A Review of the Microsoft Encarta Virtual Globe

The Microsoft Encarta Virtual Globe 1998 is a hoot. It's a CD-ROM jam-packed with geographical information, impressively detailed maps, place name quizzes, and more.

Earlier today, my wife asked me to find a map which showed the Bug River in Poland. I found the Bug in the gazetteer of one of my atlases and selected an appropriate map. Later, once I installed the Virtual Globe, the first thing I searched for was the Bug. The Globe provided an appropriately scaled map of eastern Poland and highlighted the river in yellow. We were able to zoom in and out on the map and as each map loaded onto the screen a bar scale appeared in the lower right hand corner to remind us of how much area we were looking at. We were impressed!

I then took a "World Flight" over the western United States. I used my mouse to direct my flight over California's Central Valley and them up along the Pacific Coast to Seattle. It was graphically pleasing and quite accurate, topographically.

Being a man of low attention span, I then proceeded to search for video clips and watched and listened to a short presentation about life in Moulo, Ethiopia. Excited for more multimedia entertainment, I looked at a list of world music available on the CD-ROM and listened to some popular music from Palau, Irish folk songs, and a Mexican mariachi.

The Virtual Globe also has thousands of links to web sites so if you're online while using the Globe, the site can be opened up within the program. While there are some nuggets among the sites they list, most are pretty ordinary.

The information about countries was quite impressive. I was viewing a variety of countries and was able to get current demographic data and a plethora of charts just by clicking an icon. There is also a section of the program called "World Themes" which provides lengthy essays and associated photos and images about topics from pigs to plate tectonics.

There is a virtual globe which can be manipulated by using your mouse and "dragging" on the earth to rotate it. You can also zoom in to see physical and political features including time zones, tectonic plates, the earth at night, and population density. While I used this function for quite some time, like many other functions of the Virtual Globe, I merely scratched the surface.

I finally made my way to the place name quiz, which offers several levels of difficulty. The program highlights a country or place and asks the user to identify it. The varying levels of difficulty impact the multiple choices. On easier levels, only a few of the answers given are from the appropriate region and in more difficult levels, the choices are quite challenging. I had a lot of fun playing the quiz.

The Virtual Globe was a lot of fun and indeed, if the computer is on and the CD is in the drive, I will use it to search for a place and get a good quality map on my monitor. On the other hand, I don't think is going to make me move my geographical dictionary or atlas away from my computer desk. Even a computer-oriented person such as myself prefers a paper map to one on my monitor.