The idea in the online version of my actual / virtual Harbin Hot Springs ethnographic book - http://www.scottmacleod.com/ActualVirtualHarbinBook.html - hopefully available in paper from your local online bookstore on April 2, is ...

... for YOU eventually to be able to click through INTO the virtual Harbin in Google Street View that is 3D, interactive and film-realistic (think film transposed into a virtual world/earth), and soak in the warm pool while in your home bath tub ...

... in the meanswhile,
Visit the Harbin Gate here,
and 'walk' down the road to Middletown, California, in Google Earth ...

... but especially to be able to talk with Ishvara or Heartsong or other Harbin residents, for example, mostly through film-realistic, 3D, increasingly interactive and realistic scripted avatar bots, that eventually develop their own agency ...

but also potentially in person, such as in OpenSim or in Second Life ...

and even, as virtual visitor, or tourist, do your own ethnographic field work, and add your research, photos, videos, etc., ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy-wise to this Google Street View Harbin virtual world in any of all 7,097 languages ...

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... was sharing this idea with UC Davis Professor Emeritus Dean MacCannell (author of "The Tourist" - 1976) and Kathy Graburn at dinner last night near UC Berkeley after a Tourism Studies Working Group talk there ...

and I'm so glad to say UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus of Anthropology Nelson Graburn will write the Foreward to my 450 page Harbin book ...

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For some centuries, texts have been a key and central focus of analysis in university and academia (it's so helpful to stick to the evidence), and anthropology added traveling to one's field site, and field work, as an important source of data for knowledge generation, and I hope virtual worlds especially a mature and sophisticated Google Street View with OpenSim in all 7,097 languages will become an important new generative text/source for STEM research, realistic computer modeling and ethnographic participant observation interviewing and data.

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After talking with friends, one of whom is from China, at dinner last night about the word "virtual" as "almost "(her possible working translation into Mandarin), or "as if" (one main current definition of mine from my Harbin book), I'm leaning toward going back to the previous working title for my Harbin book, with its redundancy but clarity re the key concept of "virtual":

Naked Harbin Ethnography:
Hippies, Warm Pools, Counterculture, Clothing-Optionality & Virtual Harbin

... from ...
Naked Harbin Ethnography:
Hippies, Warm Pools, Counterculture, Clothing-Optionality & the Virtual

since this latter title's last word wouldn't translate very clearly into Chinese.