Handbook of Augmented Reality

Abstract

Exploring and surveying the world has been an important goal of humankind for thousands of years. Entering the twenty-first century, the Earth has almost been fully digitally mapped. Widespread deployment of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) technology and a tremendous increase of both satellite and street-level mapping over the last decade enables the public to view large portions of the world using computer applications such as Bing Maps 1 or Google Earth 2 .