Mental Maps: Making the invisible, visible!

To fly through the LA fear landscape you need to download and instal a 3-D (VRML) viewer

This is a so-called Virtual Reality Mark Up Language (VRML) client, which will allow you to view, rotate, fly-over and manipulate the landscape from multiple angles .

There are a number of browsers available out there. Personally, I recommend two: Blaxxun Contact or Cortona. The links for downloading them are in the panel to the right.

After you download the browsers (either one, but not both), click on one of the pictures to the right. The small one will give you access to a smaller landscape. I suggest using this for slow dial-up connections. The large picture will give access to the full landscape of fear. However, this is a very large file (about 3MB), so even with a fast connection, you will have to wait a little.

INSTALL

BLAXXUN VRML Client

STRONGLY PREFERRED

NOTE: Select "Automatic download" for BLAXXUN CONTACT.

DO NOT use Blaxxun 3D

CORTONA VRML Client

The quality of the rendering could be quite mediocre, although the controls are a little better than those for Blaxxun. For best viewing, after downloading set the Preferences (by right-clicking on the 3d map, after loading the image below) as follows: Rendering- select OpenGL in list of Renderes and check the following options: Dither Colors if needed, Optimize textures for quality, anti-aliasing still scenes, Strict VRML 97 compliance (v. important)

NAVIGATE THE FEAR GEOGRAPHY OF LOS ANGELES

Large VRML landscape (3 MB)

includes all geographic details

Small VRML landscape (500KB)

does not include geographic details

NOTE: To navigate in Blaxxun RIGHT-CLICK and choose"Movement"> "Examine". To navigate in Cortona click the "STUDY" button. To examine the maps in both cases use the mouse.