The HyperLens Viewer alone offers a wide range of applications. Here are just a few.
HyperLens offers an interactive experience for pupils and students, and is ideal for presenting stimulating coursework and challenging exercises. Hyperlinking and web browser integration offer an optimal combination of explanatory material in HTML with interactive material in HyperLens.
HyperLens's Lenses offer the traditional layered presentation essential to these complex tasks. The Lenses offer an additional level of capability. Yet HyperLens is sufficiently simple (and cheap) to place in the hands of ordinary users.
For professional use, HyperLens may be used with WebÞing server software, or with a more full-featured third-party database.
HyperLens is both an applet and a Web browser, offering far more powerful image presentation and manipulation than is traditional on the Web, together with old-fashioned imagemap capabilities. HyperLens offers a fully hyperlinked web for mainly-graphical material, complementing the existing mainly-textual HTML medium.
HyperLens is ideal for CDROM consumer products, where it can be used to present all the usual physical, social, economic and political data, including todays remotely-sensed data such as satellite maps and biosphere data, in an attractive and intuitive way. For the first time, we can offer a professional-quality viewer in mass-market consumer products in this field.
With WebÞing's (or compatible) HTTP Server software, HyperLens will become an Internet-based system. A user can work with - and on - data on a server anywhere in the world, while the server takes care of chores like revision management and concurrency. This supports textual as well as image data.
In the wake of an incident, environmentalists are carefully monitoring damage and cleanup. They create a HyperLens project, using a detailed digital chart as base. Satellite images are added (as layers) as and when they become available, by a worker at the organization's offices. Meanwhile, field workers at the scene enter their own detailed observations into the same database, using the Internet. The latest data from both sources are then automatically available to the public from the organization's website.
A internationally-coordinated project is bringing together a dozen schools in a study of migrating birds. The schools are geographically dispersed, and cover a range of locations from the birds arcti breeding grounds to their tropical winter habitat. One school acts as project coordinator and sets up a Web server running HyperLens, with a set of overview pages (in HTML). Now each participating school uses HyperLens to publish their own contribution, including local maps, relevant image data, and groundwork observations.