360 degrees camara
With a playful flick of the wrist, this ball containing 36 cameras can take amazing, immersive panorama images.
A group of researchers has created this foam camera ball, which takes panoramic photos when thrown into the air. Made up of 36 fixed-focus 2-megapixel camera modules from mobile phones embedded into the sphere, the ball captures images when it reaches the highest point — the point where there is the least movement.
According to the researchers, the camera ball can take images of multiple moving objects without ghosting artefacts. When the ball returns from its flight, images can be downloaded via USB. A very cool demonstration of the technology can be seen in the video below.
source cnet.com.au
Filed under 360 virtual tours, news by on Oct 16th, 2011. Comment. 
Cappadocia in Turkey
Cappadocia was known as Hatti in the late Bronze Age, and was the homeland of the Hittite power centred at Hattusa. After the fall of the Hittite Empire, with the decline of the Syro-Cappadocians (Mushki) after their defeat by the Lydian king Croesus in the 6th century, Cappadocia was ruled by a sort of feudal aristocracy, dwelling in strong castles and keeping the peasants in a servile condition, which later made them apt for foreign slavery. It was included in the third Persian satrapy in the division established by Darius, but continued to be governed by rulers of its own, none apparently supreme over the whole country and all more or less tributaries of the Great King.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappadocia
Filed under 360 virtual tours, Collection of the best panoramas by on Sep 23rd, 2011. Comment.
Augmented Reality of tour wrist
Ever wanted to visit the Trevi Fountain in Rome or the Taj Mahal? Now you can, from the safety of your iPad.
Virtual tours have got to be one of the lamest things ever invented: Sit at your computer, squinting at some never-quite-good-enough photos of a place you'll never go to while clicking impotently with your mouse to "move" around. But touch interfaces, tablet devices, and augmented reality have changed all that. A company called Tour Wrist has one of the most spectacular virtual-tour user experiences I've seen: their free iPad app lets you hold the device up like a magic window and pan it around in physical space to reveal a totally different location — many quite exotic. This video gives you a sense of how it works:
Users will soon be able to move forward and backward "into" the scene.
"If you've ever played with Google Earth, you zoom in and get this sensation of being able to go anywhere — but eventually you stop going back because it doesn't let you do anything," explains Tour Wrist CEO Charles Armstrong. "Our goal is to give you the opportunity to actually explore these places." At the moment, Tour Wrist only offers 360-degree panoramas — although "only" is an uncharitable way to describe the fluid experience of using them. But soon the company will roll out a feature called Hot Spots which will make Tour Wrist quite Google-Earth-like indeed: users will be able to "look around" in all directions and move forward and backward "into" the scene, much like Google Street View. "Our interface is always in a constant state of improvement," says Armstrong.
Tour Wrist is plenty appealing for taking a quick pretend-vacation, but Armstrong wants Tour Wrist's intuitive, 360-degree visual interface to become "a new way of communicating" in general. Compared to typing or clicking, it certainly maps much better to our hardwired intuitions about spatial memory and physical affordances. The idea is to make the term "touring" so open-ended that it can apply to almost any kind of visual communication or demonstration: for example, Tour Wrist already lets you "tour" vehicles as well as cafes, hotels, and museums. Imagine getting a physical sense of the interior of that Range Rover you've been eyeing up without ever leaving your Barcalounger.
The Tour Wrist API, rolling out this week, is a big part of Armstrong's vision to turn his platform into a ubiquitous, sharable form of digital communication much like YouTube, Flickr, or Twitter. Six companies that offer panoramic photo products are already on board to use Tour Wrist's API. What does that mean in non-dorkspeak? "Say you're a realtor or just the guy who always finds the hot new place in town," Armstrong explains. "When you go into this place, you just wave your phone around to 'paint' the environment with the camera, and upload it to Tour Wrist." From there, TourWrist generates an embeddable link that can be emailed or pasted into blogs and other social media. "We've really modeled ourselves after YouTube," Armstrong says. "We give people tools for sharing this experience without forcing them to download the app."
Will the Tour Wrist experience be as ubiquitous five years from now as YouTube is today? Will 360-degree augmented reality party shots from the Playboy mansion (or news events!) someday go viral like so many cat videos? Tour Wrist isn't there yet, but it's an ambitious vision, and given how engaging the experience already is, it doesn't seem out of the question.
source..fastcodesign.com/
Filed under 360 virtual tours, News by on Jul 21st, 2011. Comment.
Image via Wikipedia
Virtual tours for websites
With technological advancements, convenience is a by-product as services are improved. Now, there is the possibility of utilizing 360 virtual tours or panoramic virtual tours through a virtual tour provider although perhaps you are not yet familiar what a virtual tour is. A virtual tour is a method or process that provides graphical presentations of a property to make them available for the internet user or website visitors to see. Typically, this process involves the simulation of a certain location that really exists and this may consist of moving or still images, virtual models of actual locations and videos.
To make the sites more presentable, the webmasters are making use of virtual tours and they add music, narrations, texts and animations. Using the virtual tours can be very easy since many of the sites don’t require plug-ins or downloads. The real estate market has benefited much from these virtual tours and they are using these widely. The users can now look at several properties, from homes to buildings at different angles. These days, many industries are employing this type of technology as a marketing strategy for endorsing their products and services.
Among the different excellent things offered with the utilization of virtual tours especially when used for real estate promotions is convenience because the prospective buyers can view the properties without having to see them physically. Moreover, they are able to navigate through the floors by clicking the maps and they can easily transfer between rooms and look at the property with a clear image. Because of these great advantages and conveniences, the real estate market brokers are now utilizing both virtual tours UK and panoramic virtual tours in their webpages. In order to lure other brokers and potential buyers, they make sure that their sites look attractive to the visitors.
Nowadays, the online users and visitors have benefited from the virtual tours. The website owners are also able to take many advantages from these since of the online viewers, more than 50% decide to take of the actual location after having taken the virtual tour. Also, the buying decisions of prospective customers can be influence through these virtual tours. These can increase traffic and increase the potential clients recall-value. Furthermore, the retail industries can gain more revenues as they display their showrooms. Real estate websites that used the virtual tours on various properties have effectively lured several clients and definitely increased their sales.
These virtual tours are really great for both entrepreneurs and customers so that they can save more time and they can use the site comfortably and conveniently. These can turn images to a flat 2-D world into a full 360 virtual tours to represent the real look and appearance of a property and the website visitors can take a look at the properties online as if they were actually there. Thus, virtual tours have can be very useful for companies, firms and businesses. With the use of the virtual tours, the websites become more inviting for internet users and due to the usefulness of these programs to different clients, they’ve been used by other markets beside the real estate industry.
ideaanglers.com
Filed under 360 virtual tours, Articles by on Jun 1st, 2011. Comment.
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