The Center City District and the Philadelphia Convention & Visitors Bureau, in conjunction with GeoSim Systems, have recently released Virtual Philadelphia, a richly textured 3-D model of the city. The model covers area of the Center City District – roughly Locust to Race and Front to 20th Streets – in great detail. Every building, street, alley, dumpster, and manhole cover is included. You can even click on any building and retrieve its address, history, and current business tenants. It’s just like the real Philly, except the streets are spotless, all the people are skinny, and it’s totally quiet.

One caveat: the Virtual Philadelphia application is a resource hog; make sure you have a high-speed internet connection, a decent graphics processor, and lots of memory. Even with these, it can be crash-prone – please save anything you were doing before you start the exploring! (If you don’t have a computer that will run it, check out this early promotional video; it’s a good demonstration of the model. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxk0Xm0fRFw) Even with these problems, Virtual Philadelphia is a very exciting achievement.

Philadelphia, high and low.