New technology that allows you to travel to distant destinations better and explore them without moving from your computer is being pioneered in Pennsylvania -- the first state to apply it to tourism.

The Carnegie Mellon University professor who is one of the lead technology "geeks" behind the effort calls it something special -- and something spatial.

That is, you'll soon be able not only to search one-dimensional Web pages, images and text, but have all that information integrated with panoramic views and geographical perspectives. And you'll be able to interact with it, adding your own photos and text.

"We're changing the way you're browsing for information when you're setting off to visit Pennsylvania," said Illah Nourbakhsh, associate professor at CMU's Robotics Institute, during a recent announcement.

The Commonwealth has received a $285,000 grant, through the Ben Franklin Technology Development Authority, to a partnership including CMU, Google Earth, NASA, the Pennsylvania Tourism Office and the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg. The project is complicated but basically will greatly deepen the experience of Web users seeking information about the museum and other sites in the Civil War Trails region.

In eight months to a year, Mr. Nourbakhsh said, visitors to the state's www.VisitPa.com site who have the free Google Earth software on their computers will be virtually able to "fly" over that region and see the sites from above. They'll be able to zoom in on them and look around, as many of the sites will be linked to images shot by robotic cameras CMU helped develop. And all the sites will be linked to the text and images already available on the VisitPa site.

You can see his demonstration on the archived Webcast at www.VisitPa.com/CivilWar. Already, Google Earth will "fly" users to the Civil War Museum, but it'll be months, Mr. Nourbakhsh said, before clickable yellow "shields" will start showing up on it and other area sites, allowing visitors to delve deeper.

He said 100,000 Americans "and growing" subscribe to Google Earth.

Soon, two robotic cameras will start capturing very high-resolution images in the Dutch Country Roads region. The new platform on which those gigapixel images are created, called Gigapan, allows viewers to zoom into the images right down to tiny details. At a site such as Gettysburg, you could read an inscription on a monument, even view the battlefield in different seasons.

"We call it an explorable picture," said Mr. Nourbakhsh, who is part of the Global Connection Project that has created "overlays" of National Geographic images and articles that go with maps of North America and Africa and is working on the same with other continents, among other projects.

But Pennsylvania is the first state to embrace this emerging technology for tourism, and officials say this project could be applied not just to other regions, but also to other applications.

Deputy Secretary for Tourism Mickey Rowley says this effort solidifies the state's position as a tourism leader, as this system is one other tourism groups will be able to pick up on. He clearly hopes virtual visitors become actual ones who'll spend money on the state's No. 2 industry.

Users can have a big hand in creating this, too: Later this year, all the Pennsylvania destinations on the Google Earth browser will have built-in social networking and bookmarking. That's how people all over the world can store and share their images and commentary on Pennsylvania places they know. Or want to know.

Said Mr. Nourbakhsh, "This will become a body that's dynamic and grows well beyond what we started out as."