FAKE FIELD TRIPS: USING GIGAPANS OF OUTCROPS AND HAND SAMPLES AS “BRICKS” IN CONSTRUCTING AN UNREAL VIRTUAL FIELD EXPERIENCE

The past few years have seen a tremendous growth in the quantity & quality of free digital geological gigapixel-resolution imagery, particularly in the GigaPan format. Individual GigaPan images are instantly explorable by anyone with a laptop, computer, tablet, or smartphone, regardless of their location, financial status, or physical ability. The Mid-Atlantic Geo-Image Collection (MAGIC), our repository of geological GigaPans, now hosts > 900 images with an average size of just under 1 gigapixel apiece. These images have been organized into themed galleries (for instance, “fossils” or “unconformities”) as well as tagged with location & age (for instance, “Jurassic,” or “Coastal Plain”). The images have been used to construct realistic virtual field experiences (VFEs) for various places in Virginia, Texas, Wyoming, & Alberta.

However, they may also be employed in a deliberately misrepresentational way: as elements in a contrived (or ‘fake’) VFE. Fake VFEs do not attempt to convey information about a real place or geologic event, but use GigaPans of outcrops & hand samples as exemplars within a hypothetical field context. Fake VFEs are not a replacement for place-based VFEs of real locations on Earth, just as VFEs in general are not a replacement for actual field trips. The advantage of fake VFEs is that they may be designed to teach a specific concept or set of concepts, even if the area in which those concepts are taught is entirely imaginary. The author of the fake VFE can use their own creativity to glue together outcrop GigaPans from sites around the world, linking them with a cartoon map or block diagram representing the fake ‘place’ the student is to explore. The author of a fake VFE is therefore unconstrained by imagery available of a specific real site, & may combine imagery of sedimentary strata from Israel with igneous rocks from the Sierra Nevada, & an unconformity from Portugal, as well as macro GigaPans of Australian fossils and Appalachian schist. Like a set of Lego bricks, the repository of geological GigaPans can be recombined over & over to create limitless fake VFEs. In this presentation, we present example several examples of fake VFEs & results from an initial deployment to introductory students in Fall 2015.

Support for this project comes from the Google Earth for On-site & Distance Education (GEODE, DUE 1323419).