Virtual Panoramas

Virtual Panoramas, or immersive photography, has been around for a while. The idea is to take many pictures from a single point, rotating the camera around, so that all the pictures add up to cover 360 degrees worth of view. You could take the pictures and mount them onto the inside of a cylinder, or a cylindrical room, so that once inside the cylinder you could turn around and see the view on all sides. Online, you can view these panoramas by "turning around" with your mouse, these days usually in Quicktime. I recall seeing some version of these online as early as 1995 or 1996 on some kind Berkeley campus tour site, but hadn't really given them much thought since. Yesterday I met Don Bains, one of the web pioneers of this artform, and thereby discovered some really lovely sites displaying virtual panoramas from around the world.

Apparently, the repository of geographical images at geoimages.berkeley.edu is one of the oldest websites around, created in large part by the Geography department's Don Bains. In 1995 he added some panoramas of the campus to it--probably the very panoramas I checked out as a teenager. Bains now maintains his own collection of virtual panoramas, mostly of North America, at VirtualGuidebooks.Com , but Geoimages now hosts the World Wide Panoramas project. Around the solstices (days surrounding June 21 and Dec 21, longest and shortest days of the year depending on your hemisphere) and equinoxes (March 21 and September 21, days when pretty much every place on earth experiences the same amount of daytime), immersive image photographers around the world pick sites to follow a theme, preserving a small slice of global life to document. Last June was World Heritage, September was Bridges, and December was Sanctuary.

A varied sampler of recommendations from the Sanctuary set: Mt. St. Albans, Washington, DC; the Gandhi Samadhi in India; Clutter's Cave in Worcestershire, England; Marabou's Hut in Gambia.