Peter Fisher

The ideas and techniques of virtual reality are now being made available for the creation of artificial or virtual geographies (a virtual geography refers to the creation of artificial geographies for use in research and teaching, using ideas and techniques from the field of virtual reality (VR)). Such virtual geographies are currently being constructed and used at a number of sites and include virtual cities, landscape visualization, visualizing past and future geographies, visualizing abstract concepts and taking people on virtual field courses. Virtual Reality in Geography covers 'through the window' VR systems, 'fully immersive' VR systems and hybrids of the two types. The authors examine the Virtual Reality Modeling Language approach, and explore its deficiencies when applied to real geographic environments. This book will be of great interest to geographers, computer scientists and all those interested in multimedia and computer graphics. There is an accompanying CD-ROM containing a rich selection of images and pieces of virtual reality software. This is a totally unique book covering an area of geography that is rapidly becoming used in all aspects of the field. It covers all the major uses and methods of virtual reality used by geographers and the lack of anything else written about the subject to date should ensure a wide readership. The authors have produced a CDROM that comes with the book of virtual reality images that will be a fascinating companion to the text.

Virtual Reality in Geography covers through the window VR systems, fully immersive VR systems, and hybrids of the two types. The authors examine the Virtual Reality Modeling Language approach and explore its deficiencies when applied to real geographic environments. This is a totally unique book covers all the major uses and methods of virtual reality used by geographers. The authors have produced a CDROM that comes with the book of virtual reality images that will be a fascinating companion to the text. This book will be of great interest to geographers, computer scientists and all those interested in multimedia and computer graphics.

The author of this important contribution to the study of Blake was tragically drowned in a sailing accident when he had almost completed it in manuscript. His was a critical mind of singular erudition and power. As is abundantly evidenced in these chapters which Northrop Frye has prepared for publication. Fisher had made a careful study of Oriental philosophy and of Plato and the Neo-Platonists and this background enabled him to make an original and fruitful analysis of his central interest, Blake. The book is not a study of Blake's sources but of his context. The author is trying to answer the question: given Blake's general point of view, why does he make the specific judgments he does make, judgments which so often seem merely glib or petulant or perverse. Blake himself, in explaining a painting, remarked: "It ought to be understood that the Persons, Moses and Abraham, are not here meant, but the States Signified by those Names." Fisher explains what Blake meant by "states," and shows that such names as Plato, Bacon or Newton, or such terms as "priest" or "deist" in Blake's writings, refer not to individuals but to cultural forces in Western civilization, the influence of which accounted for the social conditions that Blake attacked. The attack itself, Fisher shows, was based on a revolutionary dialectic, a sense of the underlying opposition between reactionaries committed to obscurantism and social injustice, the "Elect" as Blake calls them, and the prophets committed to a greater vision (the "Reprobate"), with the mass of the public (the "Redeemed") in between.