Virtual tour top honor
POTSDAM — SUNY Potsdam has received an award for its one-of-a-kind virtual campus tour.
The college's online tour took best of category at the annual SUNY Council for University Advancement Awards for Excellence ceremony, held June 9 in Saratoga Springs. The tour was recognized in the division of electronic communications and interactive media for its dynamic interface as well as its creative and clean design.
"It's completely unique — there's nothing else like it on the Web in terms of the navigation interface or the dynamic relationships," said Deborah L. Dudley, the college's director of marketing and communications. "Really you are exploring Potsdam based on your own interests as an individual. That's how we want students to come to the college: we want you to explore your personal interests and passions, so we set up the tour to mimic that."
Unlike most virtual college tours, SUNY Potsdam's is self-led and customizable based on users' interests. It begins as a blank page upon which free-floating bubbles appear and interconnect based on users' searches, ultimately creating a web of photographs and videos about SUNY Potsdam people, buildings, activities and organizations rather than an aerial map of grounds and buildings.
The bubbles can be selected and moved at will: drag one across the screen and the rest, like helium balloons tethered to a string, will follow. Although the dynamic software is not intended to replace the actual campus visit, Ms. Dudley said, the virtual tour is a good starting point for prospective students.
"What I hope is that it gives people a good sense of our personality and the creative aspect of our campus," Ms. Dudley said. "It's always great to have something new and innovative and different from your peers because it sets you apart, but what's more important is that it's representative of the true experience at Potsdam."
The tour was designed by the college's public affairs team and was developed with the help of the admissions office and the Maryland-based IDFive design firm. According to Ms. Dudley, it is still a work in progress: the college hopes to see the tour's content double within the next year.
The SUNY Potsdam tour:
Filed under news by on Jun 27th, 2011. Comment. 
Prague, Czech Republic, March 28, 2011 – A newly published photo of the ancient Philosophical
Library at Strahov Monastery takes the crown as the largest interior photo in the world. The
image of Strahov Philosophical Library, at 360cities.net/library, has a total resolution of 40
gigapixels, or 40 billion pixels.
Shot by photographer Jeffrey Martin over a period of five days, the image reveals the highestresolution
view of any interior space that has ever been captured. In the image, thousands of
priceless, ancient books are visible, in detail down to the worn leather on the spines; the fresco
on the ceiling of the library is captured down to the brush strokes and cracks in the plaster. In
short, this photo captures the details of room in a way that has never been done before.
Previous attempts at world record gigapixels include Martin’s 80-gigapixel image of London,
a 26-gigapixel image of Paris, a 70-gigapixel image of Budapest, a 26-gigapixel image of
Dresden, and Martin's previous record holder from 2009, an 18-gigapixel spherical image of
Prague. This new Strahov 40 gigapixel image, if printed at normal photographic resolution,
would be 23 meters long and 12 meters tall.
Martin, a panoramic photographer and the Founder of 360Cities.net, created the Strahov 40
gigapixel image from 2947 high-resolution individual photos. These photos were then stitched
together into one single image using a powerful workstation PC.
Further information about the making of this image can be found at http://blog.360cities.net/
strahov-gigapixel
About 360 Cities
360 Cities is dedicated to promoting geo-located, high-resolution spherical imagery by providing
the best- anywhere platform for publishing panoramic photography on the web. 360Cities.net
is the web's largest collection of spherical, map-based panoramas, and through its partnership
with Google Earth, this content is introduced to an even wider audience worldwide. 360 Cities is
a Netherlands limited company with a subsidiary in Prague, Czech Republic.
Contact
Jeffrey Martin – Founder, 360 Cities
email: [email protected]
Filed under 360 virtual tours, news, Photos by on May 23rd, 2011. Comment.
While the football fans among you were following Manchester City and Stoke City battling it out for this year’s FA Cup yesterday at Wembley Stadium in London, 360 Cities founder Jeff Martin was pitch-side capturing a 20-gigapixel photo of the crowd – the largest-yet 360-degree photo of a sports event.
The image has now been launched on http://wembley360.wembleystadium.com/ – less than 24 hours after shooting! People viewing the image can tag themselves or their friends if they were in the 90,000-strong audience. Our talented team also built the website and created the tagging application. There are a lot of famous faces in the crowd. Stay tuned as the number of face-tags starts building up. [update - 1200 tags added in the first hour!]
This event is a major accomplishment for 360 Cities. Working with Wembley for several weeks in advance, the shoot was meticulously planned and rehearsed. There were only 90 minutes of shooting time to work with. By contrast, our earlier gigapixel images of, for example, Prague, London and the Strahov Library were shot over days. Jeff was present for the FA Cup semi-final in May to do a dry-run. Wembley’s excellent agency Dare Digital organized everything with skill and creativity. Read all about how we did it on the How We Did It page.
Jeff Martin preparing for the semi-final dry run
360cities.net
Filed under 360 virtual tours, All about virtual tours, news, Photos by on May 16th, 2011. Comment.
Launched last year, Tour Wrist is a clever interactive app for iPhone and iPad which lets you view a series of beautifully photographed landmarks in 360-degrees. Over 18,000 “tours” across the world are available to explore, from Times Square in New York to the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
Tour Wrist uses what it calls 3D-viewing technology to allow iPhone or iPad users to view tours in ‘immersive’ mode, allowing them to rotate their iOS device in front of them and experience their chosen location as if they were actually there. Or if you prefer, you can simply swipe through the image whichever way you like in 360 degrees and watch the landscape unravel.
[Pic: courtesy of TourWrist.com]
The app works well at capturing sport and music events, including the tour of Jay Z at Coachella (pictured) where you can move through the crowd and back onto the stage, reliving a moment of the gig in a unique way. Sharing experiences with friends may become a big part of the future of the apps’ future, as there are plans to allow iPhone users to capture their own scenes and submit their own virtual tours with the launch of the TourWrist API in June this year.
Tour Wrist lets you easily share your favourite tours with friends on Facebook or Twitter, and each tour also offers handy links through to book flights or hotels nearby the location of the scene you’re viewing.
Those who don’t have an iPhone or iPad can also use Tour Wrist on a laptop or PC – full-screen mode is particularly impressive due to the high-quality images taken by professional photographers. Though we love the abiity to virtually travel anywhere in the world for panoramic views, we're also looking forward to being able to submit our own tours for you to enjoy. Watch this space!
Tour Wrist is free at the app store. Watch the video below to see Tour Wrist in action.
Filed under news by on May 7th, 2011. Comment.
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