360video technology
IT is one of the most exciting developments in digital photography and it's being made right here in WA.
Called 360 degree video or virtual video, it is an interactive moving film version of the virtual tour commonly used on tourism or real estate websites.
Instead of seeing just what the camera "sees", users can scroll up, down, left or right to see what they want to see in a particular scene.
Unlike its predecessor, virtual video uses sophisticated custom-designed technology to give viewers the sense they are actually walking or flying through a location.
Bunbury photographer John Copeland has been making virtual videos for the past three years but has only recently been able to share his work thanks to the rest of the world catching up.
Mr Copeland also recently shot a virtual video of the Margaret River bushfires which destroyed more than 40 properties last month.
"Virtual video's only really been available online in the last six months because of internet speeds, although we have been able to do it probably over the last two to three years," Mr Copeland said.
"There was no way of showing it online before that. We were just sort of waiting for the right time to spring it online."
Mr Copeland said he started playing around with video technology several years ago while he was working in the UK but stopped when he realised "the internet was holding" him back.
Internet speeds, he explained, were not fast enough to accommodate the technology used to show the 360 degree videos.
Then a few years ago, after he had returned to WA, he began exploring it again and began designing the specialised equipment and software needed to create these interactive "tours".
Now three years on, Pixelcase, his company, which also has offices in England and Canada, is in high demand following the success of their first 360 video of Nimmo Bay resort in Vancouver which clocked up more than 25 million hits.
"Things just kind of snowballed from there. The interest has been pretty great," Mr Copeland said.
His company, which is one of only a handful that is capable of producing the virtual videos, have also filmed projects in London, Paris, Madrid, New York as well as every Australian state and recently just completed the Official Virtual tour of Eiffel Tower.
by Emily Moulton heraldsun.com.au
Filed under 360 virtual tours, news by on Jan 9th, 2012. Comment. 
Kerala,India virtual tours
A screen grab from keralain360.com that shows a view of the Varkala beach when viewed in full-screen.
With the online media scaling greater heights at a rapid rate, the fruits of such progressive leaps are yet to be fully reaped by the tourism industry of the state. keralain360.com, a tourism photography website, aims to fill the existing void to a significant extent by projecting the varied and distinct beauty of Kerala in all its splendour through 360 degree virtual reality photography.
The website features a host of interactive 360 degree panoramic images of as many as 80 tourism spots and 20 major cities across the state. Siril Thomas, the creative director and photographer of the website, points out that efforts have been made to convey the realistic feel of viewing the locations for netizens from anywhere in the world. “There has not been a portal that has managed to incorporate the visual beauty of our charming tourist destinations along with a comprehensive logistical database for visiting such places. Pieces of information regarding getting to such areas have remained scattered and this has resulted in daunting tasks for those planning vacations.
In order to lessen the burden of tourists, keralain360.com would display relevant details including those regarding accommodation facilities including resorts and homestays, house boats, and approved tour operators. The distance between a specific tourist destination and a nearby city can also be understood in the website. Several search options have also been activated for the benefit of the users,” he says.
The website is also being developed to include 360 degree panoramic images of the interiors of accommodation facilities so as to enlighten the prospective visitor. Discussions in this regard have commenced with the managements of a few resorts and homestays, says Siril.
Siril has been supported by Syama Mohan, the content manager, and Sambhu Dayal, the website’s designer in the venture. The project has consumed nearly seven months so far and will continue to expand, according to Siril.
He also points out that talks are progressing with the District Tourism Promotion Council (DTPC) in order to incorporate the facilities offered by website to the official portal of the Tourism department. The website was launched by Minister for Tourism A.P. Anil Kumar at a function held here on Friday.
sourece:thehindu.com
Filed under 360 virtual tours, news by on Jan 9th, 2012. Comment.
3d travel experience without…
Ever wonder what it’s like to trek to Mount Everest? Unless you’ve got a month of vacation and a big bank account, the next best answer may soon be sitting right in front of you.
Opening to the public on Saturday, Journey to Everest promises to bring Nepal to your computer screen via interactive 3-D. Along the way, the program offers a glimpse into the future of virtual tours.
The Journey was created by Singapore-based 3rd Planet Pte. Ltd. as a portal and marketing tool for the Nepal Tourism Board (NTB). “[This] enables us to showcase our country in a totally new dimension,” said NTB CEO Prachanda Man Shrestha in a statement.
Or several. After registering (free) on the 3rd Planet website, users can explore Kathmandu, navigate around Tribhuvan Airport and fly over the Himalaya to the town of Lukla. Right-click your mouse to activate “fly-through” mode and the scenes get surprisingly realistic.
In Kathmandu, for example, users can walk the streets, peer around corners, even pass through the exterior columns of the Chyasim Deval temple in Patan Durbar Square. (Careful, it takes some coordination not to walk into the walls.) Later, in a scene straight out of “Lost Horizon,” you can ride along as a prop plane works its way over the mountains to the remote town of Lukla.
For now, that’s where the journey ends with the rest of the trek to Everest expected to go live next year. Even so, 3rd Planet CEO Terence Mak believes interactive 3-D travel is ready for prime time. “Pictures and words don't do justice to a location,” he told msnbc.com. “Of all the various ways of remembering information, the human mind remembers it best through experience.”
Others in the industry appear to agree. Last year, 3D Travel of Honolulu launched 3-D portals that combine Google Earth imagery with travel-specific information for Hawaii and Las Vegas.
For Sin City, for example, users can fly along a videogame-like representation of the Strip, ducking under the Eiffel Tower at Paris Las Vegas, following along the roller coaster at New York New York and passing through the fountains at Bellagio. Sidebars let users get more information on hotels, shows and other attractions and, in select cases, make immediate bookings.
The company expects to launch a similar offering for San Francisco in January.
Whether as a marketing platform or booking tool, interactive 3-D travel is still in its infancy. However, it’s likely to become more common as the technology improves, more destinations opt in and more people incorporate tablets and other mobile devices into their travel planning.
“There’s a lot more planning going on with iPads and other tablets,” said Norm Rose of Travel Tech Consulting Inc. “The more you can give people an opportunity to experience the virtual world, the more it will encourage actual travel to those destinations.”
Or, as Mak puts it, “We live in a 3-D world and the best way to understand a destination is in 3-D.”
source: By Rob Lovitt, msnbc.com
Filed under 360 virtual tours, Articles, news by on Dec 11th, 2011. Comment.
Android app for 360 panoramas
It’s a good day for all you Android lovers out there, because today you’re getting a killer app from iOS land: 360 Panorama. The app is from Occipital, the 2008 TechStars grad, also makers of the (now eBay-owned) barcode scanner Red Laser.
This is the first real-time panoramic photo capture app for Android, as the others on the Android Market require manual capture of separate photos followed by stitching. With 360 Panorama, you just move the device around to capture the image.
In case you’re unfamiliar with 360 Panorama, it’s one of the easiest tools to take a 360-degree photo. All you have to do is launch the app and pan your camera around to take the photo. You can then save, email or share your photo to Facebook or Twitter.
If, on the other hand, you previously used 360 Occipital on iOS, you already know that this is one of the better photography apps ever created. And if you were an iOS user who switched to Android, you’ll be happy to know that you can login once again using your same 360 Panorama credentials from before.
For the most part, the Android version is the same as the older iOS app, but there are a couple of differences. For starters, Android users get one new feature that hasn’t made its way to the iPhone yet: an in-app list of saved panoramas. It should also be noted that the Android app doesn’t use gyroscopes at all yet, so it’s not recommended that you pan it against blank walls. (The next update, V1.1, will tap into gyros when it’s more stable).
There’s an interesting side note to the story of this app’s development, too. Occipital had once abandoned Android development when it started back in 2008, citing performance issues. As Co-founder Jeff Powers wrote then:
Objective-C kills the Java implementation on Android. It’s almost exactly 100 times faster. Note that I’m unsure if the memory allocation is included in the timing, so a more conservative statement is that Objective-C can run a tight loop 50 times faster than the Dalvik JVM. It’s also true that real applications aren’t full of tight loops, and a real Android application won’t be 50 times slower than an iPhone counterpart. Nevertheless, all else being equal, it will be slower, and potentially a lot slower.
For now, we’re sadly going to put our Android development on hold and switch to iPhone, and keep an eye out for performance improvements.
Today, Android is finally ready for an app like this. “Only now has the OS come around enough to make this even possible (thanks to the NDK and Open GL),” explains Powers.
Android users buying new phones will soon get a built-in panoramic photo capture app of their own with Ice Cream Sandwich’s (Android 4.0) default camera app. But 360 Panorama will work on almost any device made in the last two years, running Gingerbread (Android 2.3) and up.
You can grap the new app this morning for 99 cents from occipital.com/360/app.
source http://techcrunch.com
Filed under 360 virtual tours, Articles, news by on Nov 22nd, 2011. Comment.
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