About the BBCE The Big Beef Creek Exploration (BBCE) is a data-rich, computer generated representation of a physical world estuary on the Washington State Olympic Peninsula. The BBCE is designed to give users a better sense of the overall watershed before they venture out to experience it in person. A second goal is to provide a single on-line repository for geo-referenced data obtained through fieldwork. The environmental content has been developed by the University of Washington Center for Environmental Visualization (CEV). Geo-spatial visualizations developed at the CEV focus on the marine and coastal environments of the Northeast Pacific and the Pacific Northwest. Spatially registered representations of ecosystems and environ-mental processes are generated using scientific datasets from the University of Washington Earth Science programs at the Big Beef Creek field station and the multidisciplinary PRISM research project. Participants in a BBCE session download and run the Java 3D-based application on a Linux, Windows, NT, or Solaris operating system. Upon launching the system, users configure their mode of interaction with the 3-D data-rich environment. They choose an avatar (a representation of themselves in the 3D environment) from a collection designed with a Pacific Northwest theme in mind. The avatars function as metaphors, enabling users to move around the 3-D environment, and providing a perspective from which the users view phenomena and content in the virtual world. Once the world loads, each participant is free to fly around the world to investigate the default content set, watch other participants fly around the world, or change their avatar to experience the BBCE from another being ’s perspective (human, scientist, whale, fish, etc.). Participants, while in human or scientist mode, have the ability to perform inquiries such as getting weather and remote sensing data or making distance measurements. Users select appropriate tools from menus or toolbars to perform each task. Traditional communication tools such as chat and asynchronous messaging are among those available.