Daniel Kaplan - Portail documentaire du Ministère de l'Ecologie

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potential customers. IT also provides possibilities to
manipulate pictures and, especially in the case of
scenery, strong and individually differing mental
impressions can be created. The other potential
factor is that the Internet provides textual data
about location, and therefore the Internet is widely
used as a new channel for gathering information
before a trip. In fact, via the development of new
Internet script-languages (Perl, Java and XML) and
web-browser capabilities to support threedimensional,
interactive and moving objects, has
arisen the idea of virtual travelling, virtual cities and
interactive cities on the WWW. These visualisations,
with interactive features and moving objects
coupled with textual information have challenged
traditional travel guides and tourist information
leaflets. However, the basic idea of virtual travelling
and speaking of net locations as places seems to be
questionable (see Brey 1998: 253).
In the “travelling” context, the advertisers’ goal
is to get people to travel. There are two types of
instances related to this, and they both have
different, but not exclusive marketing strategies. The
first of these instances is the actual location and its
administration – the city. It seems quite questionable
to think that cities would spend valuable resources in
order to create the best possible virtual substitute for
their city if there were even a doubt of the possibility
that people would substitute real-world travelling
experience with the electronic counterpart. Indeed,
there is no question that at the present moment that
the virtual experience is generally valued more as
bait for the future travel. Several cultural and
sociological studies have been made on the impacts
of tourism and the Internet and on their effects on
culture, economic activity and political decisionmaking
(Poon 1994; Douglas et al. 1994; Burns
1995).
Secondly, there are IT companies that provide
e.g. Internet services and connections are constantly
promoting WWW-travelling via their online
marketing strategies. Taylor comes to the same
conclusion in his article on virtual reality and how
the public knowledge of it is created through
massive advertisement campaigns (Taylor 1997:
176). However, the actual Internet locations and
sites that are visited are irrelevant to the companies.
The only important factor is the use of the
connection provided by the company. As long as the
connection is continued, it makes no difference
where the customer “surfs”. It seems that the idea of
travelling is one of the easiest ways to persuade
people to use the Internet. The idea of virtual
travelling “sells”, and that is why it is one of the
leading marketing slogans. For example, companies
like Microsoft, Sonera and Nokia are using these
kinds of themes in their wireless future advertisements.
But as has been argued, once the product is
bought – the travelling idea loses its meaning to the
connection provider. The idea of transforming
Dr Tommi Inkinen
“travelling” in to the Internet “surfing” is most
questionable.
There are strong differences between different
cities’ image creation via the Internet (e.g. Inkinen
1999). This analysis was done using evaluative and
interpretative methods in order to explore the
phenomenon of urbanscape and its presentations
on the Internet. It proved to be a useful way to assess
the different aspects of web-site design in relation to
the real world essence of these locations. The second
theme is related to the dynamic nature of the sites.
Site updating can be seen an important factor in
achieving a competitive advantage. This relates to
the fact that sites are often poorly updated. The
cities usually order their web-services from the
private sector, and therefore the attitude toward web
advertising is an influential criterion in city’s image
building process. Thirdly, cities are evidently using
their Internet pages primarily for two purposes.
Firstly, as an official information source related to
the services, and secondly, as an advertisement to
promote their image to sell the city to a possible
tourist, corporation or citizen. During the three past
decades, advertising has developed in a more
visualised direction, away from the textual form
(Fleming and Roth 1991: 290). The escalation of the
Internet can be argued to further that development
on the grounds that sites are usually very well
illustrated, and the power that a site has over an
observer depends more on the visual appearance
than on the amount or nature of text included. Also,
the first impression that is provided through the
visualisation is usually the key factor as to whether
the text will be read at all.
The case of virtual Turku –
representing the city
Description of the case
The composition of the virtual Turku web-site
is diverse. The main function of the site is to provide
three-dimensional model of the city. The main page
also provides links to other virtual locations and to
the information sources relevant to the city-model.
The information is provided in Finnish, English and
Swedish.
The project is based on streaming technology
that provides good tools to represent threedimensional
objects. However, in the interviews,
several technical problems were addressed. They
were related to the technical implementation.
Firstly, the transaction speed of commonly used
devices is inadequate. The most of the Internet
usage is conducted via modem connections. The
structure is too heavy and absolute time of
downloading the data is too long for most of the