As a part of the Living Textbook project, we are developing a flight simulator interface to geographical data of New York state. Students will be able to ``fly'' around a rendered 3D view of the state that is interfaced to a Geographical Information System, so that they can select landmarks and cities and obtain multimedia information about these places.
Currently high-quality real-time 3D terrain rendering is not feasible on single processor workstations, and certainly not on machines such as Macs that are likely to be used in schools. So we are aiming to interface existing 3D GIS software running on a Mac with a parallel terrain renderer running on a high-performance parallel computer connected via a fast ATM network.