New towns and cities are springing up in cyberspace, constructed with digital bricks and mortar. These new electronic cities are popularly known as virtual cities, digital cities or cyber-cities. Many thousands of people are using these virtual cities to carry out everyday activities like shopping, relaxing and meeting friends.
Cities are geographic centres of people, activities and services.
The urban form and layout of cities are familiar to most people. In this article we shall begin by discussing the nature of virtual cities, before examining ways of creating, on the Web, three-dimensional models of the buildings for virtual cities. The term 'Virtual City' is widely used on the World-Wide Web to describe a diverse range of different information interfaces and content. They are often created solely for advertising purposes, particularly for tourism promotion and make no attempt to represent the built form of cities. 3D Virtual Cities use virtual reality technologies to model the built form of cities, to varying degrees of accuracy and realism.