Week 9-2003 Fullscreen of the Week

London View from the Monument by Douglas Cape

Douglas Cape is a London professional photographer, founder of z360.com He has been doing interactive Virtual Reality Photography since 1995.
A series of panoramas made for Harrods was actually my first inspiration for doing fullscreen QTVR. It was online already in 1999 at the official Harrods website. Displayed in a size of 800x600 it was the first on the web which you could call fullscreen.

The view of London is made from the Monument, the tallest isolated stone column in the world. At 202 feet height you have a magnificent view of London. Look for the hotspots in the movie to display the name of some of the buildings in the controlbar.

Images for feature links available here

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Week 8-2003 Fullscreen of the Week

Sunset in Palisade Basin, Bishop Creek, High Sierra

by Landis Bennett, 360Geographics.com

Landis Bennett has been exploring the realm of immersive imagery for 7 years.

His website 360Geographics has hundreds of panoramas from all around the United States and Canada showing tourist destinations as well as places off the beaten path.

He is also a member of IQTVRA the international organisation for Quicktime VR Photograpers. At Photokina in Sept. an exhibition of panoramic images was held and this exhibition can now also be seen on the internet at IQTVRA Panoramic Print Gallery where Landis Bennett also is represented. Prints are available for purchase at the site.

Landis describes his panorama like this:

Summertime in the High Sierra. A short backpacking trip in the Bishop Pass area led to this beautiful sunset scene. Palisade Basin is located in California's Kings Canyon National Park just on the west side of the Palisade Crest. Summertime in the High Sierra mountains consists of almost daily thunderstorms that sometimes can go well into the evening. This day the clouds came and went. A thunderstorm forced us to take cover under some rocks during the day, left us alone to make camp and dinner, and provided the beautiful clouds to turn everything around us orange and red with the sunset.

This panorama was taken at 11,450 feet (3,490 m). The peaks covered by clouds include the aptly named Thunderbolt Peak at 14,000 feet (4,267 m) and North Palisade, the highest of the Palisade Crest at 14,242 feet (4,341 m).The Palisade Crest is home to five of the Sierra Nevada's eleven fourteeners.

For more views of this area, see the Bishop Creek - Kings Canyon area of the 360Geographics website.

All around the world marches have been held against the Bush administration plans for war against Iraq. In Australia the largest protest marches ever. 200.000 in Sydney.
In San Francisco an estimation of 150.000 people.
Seattle 20.000 - 30.000

The latest estimations of the numbers in the big cities say:

New York 400.000, Rome 1 million, London 1 million, Berlin 500.000

An estimation of 30 million people world wide have demonstrated their opinion. Enough for BUSH. Lets hope.

Récits en ligne des manifestations

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Millions...

CNN.com - Tens of thousands in San Francisco

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Week 7-2003

Angkor Wat Cambodia - UNESCO World Heritage site

QTVR by Tito Dupret World Heritage Tour

The Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia is the worlds largest religious monument. The temples at Angkor was built 879 - 1191AD and used for more than 400 years during the kings of the Khmer empire. The Khmers left the city in 1432, and after that it was lost in the jungle until a French explorer, Henri Mouhot, found it in 1860. He died of malaria 1 year later only 35 years old.

A restoration project was started in 1908 and has continued since than except for periods in the 70's and 80's when military operations prevented archaeologists from working in the area.

UNESCO made it a World Heritage site in 1992.

Tito Dupret is a young multimedia photographer from Brussels who during the last 2 years have been travelling in Asia, Africa and Russia to document the World Heritage sites in Virtual Reality Panoramas.

He was schocked when the Talibans in Afghanistan destroyed hundreds of unique temples in the beginning of 2001, and decided to do something for the preservation and documentation of the world's cultural heritage.

Destruction the way the Talibans did is not the only thing that can happen to these places. Only 3 weeks ago one of the World Heritage sites in China was destroyed by a fire. Tito was there before the fire.

Tito is trying to finance the project by offering you a banner at the World Heritage Tour for a small amount. Go there and choose your favourite place before someone else .

Links:

Welcome to World Heritage Center

Angkor.com

AngkorWat.org

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Week 6-2003
The Top of Denmark Grenen-Skagen
by Hans Nyberg

Welcome to the Top of Denmark and to the "new" panoramas.dk
I have been planning for a long time to redesign panoramas.dk (WorldWide VR Panoramas) and after a long weekend I am now almost ready. You will find that some pages are not ready yet but everything should work.

Read more about the changes in the left column which now is the Directory and News Column.

Last 2 months has been a fantastic experience with more visitors than I had ever hoped for a year ago. More than 250.000 full screen movies has been viewed by more than 120.000 visiters.

The fullscreen this week is one of my own. I have not had time to prepare for a new and as the Top of Denmark is one of my favorites I desided to show it.

The place is the most Northern spot in Denmark (besides Greenland)

It is called Grenen (The Branch), just north of Skagen the small village in North Jutland where the famous Danish painters Ancher, P.S. Krøyer and our national poet Holger Drachman lived.

It started in the middle of the l9th century and is called the Danish Golden Age. The light at this place is beautiful and that was one of the things that attracted the artists.

When you walk out on the sandbank at Grenen you can actually place your right foot in the Skagerak and the left in the North Sea.

And that is what thousands of tourists do. Skagen is visited by 2 million tourists each year.

This is a large Full Screen movie 2 mb, but I did not want to spoil the quality as this one is guite sensitive for large compression.
However while the movie loads you can try one of the links below. Read about the artists in Skagen and this little fishing village which is world known because of them. The links are also on the movie page.

Links:
Skagen/Aalbæk
Skagen, Denmark
Aarhus Art museum - Danish Golden Age

Hans Nyberg Virtual Evangelist Interview in VR MAG

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