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. 
Image via Wikipedia
Virtual tours for your website
Creating your website will require the best of everything. The content of your website is what will draw and keep traffic coming to your site. You will therefore need high quality content which must be presented in the most appealing manner possible. It is worse to have high quality content poorly presented, than having poor quality being well presented. Strong influence on making decision to do business with you or not by everyone who visits your website depends on what you have on your site.
Content in the web is presented in different forms including, pictures, text, videos, a 360 virtual tour and audios. A combination of all these or some of them is what most websites have. Visual content is usually a powerful marketing tool since it allows potential clients to actually see what they are looking to buy. Pictures, videos and panoramic virtual tours are forms of visual content. A virtual tour provider embraces video and still photographs in creating a presentation that gives the impression of walking through a location. The term however more often applies to the use of still pictures in putting together the virtual tour. There is great detail delivered through the presentation and the dynamic display is more interactive as compared to standard photos that may be displayed on the website.
There are certain businesses that need to give a great amount of visual information to potential clients. To deliver marketing messages to clients in industries such as hospitality, real estate and export the use of powerful visual tool is used. However, for a long time still pictures and videos have long been the only option to communicate with the clients. Web content has been improved on the delivery of high quality by the aid of virtual tour. Virtual tour gives your clients a better experiences as compared to showing them photos of your home, hotel or goods. Through specialized software the business owners who decide to go for virtual tour technology find several important benefits.
The inclusion of text information in the presentation allowed by the virtual technology currently is a plus apart from the beauty and greater detail of the presentation. You can include more facts about your location or parts of it by having hotspots. One thing marketing requires is dramatization which cannot be found in standard photographs. Stirring an interest and giving people a reason to follow up is what virtual tour does.
It is definitely easier and cheaper to use standard photographs on your website than virtual tour technology, The angle of how effective each option is, is what businesses should look at. High traffic and higher sales are delivered by virtual tour technology. What every business is looking to achieve, is high returns which may require higher amount of capital investment. Using virtual tour technology is the way to go for those who are not already using it.
articlessurf.com/business/marketing/how-360-panoramic-virtual-tour-technology-beats-normal-photography-hands-down
Filed under 360 virtual tours, Articles by on May 15th, 2011. Comment.
- Image by copycatko via Flickr
The 2010 Taipei International Flora Expo is just around the corner.
The Taipei City Government is inviting internet users to get a glimpse of the expo online before it opens on Saturday.
A spokeswoman for the expo, Ma Chien-hui, said on Wednesday that virtual tours of each of the expo's 14 pavilions are available online. Those include newly added tours for the Pavilion of Dreams, the EXPO Theater and the EXPO Hall.
"Web users can take a virtual tour of the 14 pavilions. The tour includes an environmentally friendly structure at Xinsheng Park, the world's biggest wall featuring the drawings of [well-known Taiwanese artist] Jimmy, the Pavilion of New Fashion made from PE bottles and the British-styled Taipei Story House. People can visit our website to learn more about the pavilions they plan to visit so that they can get a feel of [what they're like]," said Ma.
The virtual tour was shot on location at the expo. With the click of a mouse, web users are given either a daytime or nighttime view of the venues of the upcoming Flora Expo. The virtual tours give visitors a panoramic view of the expo and close-up shots as well.
For more information, visit http://vr.2010taipeiexpo.tw
Filed under 360 virtual tours, All about virtual tours, Examples of virtual tours by on Nov 29th, 2010. Comment.
New Record-Breaking Gigapixel Panoramic Photo of London
Image by Jeffrey Martin, www.360cities.net
Prague, Czech Republic, November 16, 2010 – A newly published 360-degree photo of London takes the
crown as the largest spherical panoramic photo in the world. The image of London, at 360cities.net/london,
has a total resolution of 80 gigapixels, or 80 billion pixels. Shot by photographer Jeffrey Martin over a period
of three days from the top of the
Zooming in in apartment somewhere far away
Image by Jeffrey Martin, www.360cities.net
Centre Point building at the crossroads of Oxford Street and Tottenham
Court Road, the image reveals the highest-resolution view of any city that has ever been captured. From this
vantage point – 36 stories up in the air – an astonishing number of landmarks, houses, skyscrapers, shops,
offices, and streets are visible. Countless people at street level are observable, as well as thousands of
windows, many of which reveal glimpses of life inside.
and a terrace somewhere in the panorama
In short, it is a portrait of London, the likes of which
has never been made before.
Previous attempts at world record gigapixels include 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 London gigapixel image, if printed at normal photographic resolution,
would be 35 meters long and 17 meters tall (115 feet x 56 feet).
Martin, a panoramic photographer and the Founder of 360Cities.net, created the London gigapixel image
from 7886 high-resolution individual photos taken from the Centre Point building. These thousands of photos
were then stitched together as one single image on a powerful Fujitsu CELSIUS workstation, provided for the
project by Fujitsu Technology Solutions. The computer comprises dual 6-core CPUs, 192GB of RAM, and a
4GB graphics card.
To encourage people to explore the 80-gigapixel image of London in its finest detail, 360 Cities will launch
three separate contests to find and describe items or places in the photo. In the first contest the winner will
receive a Fujitsu 27" LCD monitor provided by Fujitsu Technology Solutions, computer and camera bags
provided by Crumpler.com will be awarded in the second, and in the third contest, over $3000 worth of
holidays will be awarded, courtesy of Intrepid Travel (intrepidtravel.com) and their subsidiary, Urban
Adventures (urbanadventures.com).
Further information about the making of the image can be found at http://blog.360cities.net/london-gigapixel.
About 360 Cities
360 Cities is dedicated to promoting geo-located, high-resolution spherical imagery by providing the bestanywhere
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.
Filed under 360 virtual tours, All about virtual tours, Collection of the best panoramas, News, Photos by on Nov 16th, 2010. Comment.
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