Synthetic Natural Environments"

I reckon it is an oxymoron of sorts. What the word is meant to emphasize is that the virtual world being represented is a real place and not a purely fictitious place for example, NYC as opposed to, say, the planet Glabnox.

http://virtualcities.ida.org/ has some interesting stuff on it, for example, that's used for emergency response training.

OTOH, some of the "real" stuff looks pretty unreal. Here's a shot I took http://www.geocities.com/elbillaf/tah_av3b.bmp of the bottom of Lake Tahoe (looking up at the landslide area) one of my interns created from freely available data the USGS maintains on the lake (http://tahoe.usgs.gov/). Looks kinda like a martian landscape.


Oh, yea, another term is "integrated natural environments."