In the past we have always had a slightly 'unsure' view of companies offering to take panoramic imagery and use it themselves as part of a global database but 360Cities.net is really rather good. The company, registered in the Netherlands, is dedicated to promoting geo-mapped, VR panorama photography and VR photographers around the world.
Aimed at creating a unique global network of members who are specialists in VR photography their viewing platform is notably feature-rich. For example, it is easy to embed your panorama directly in a blog after uploading. The example of the London Eye below is by Tom Mills, an international panoramic photography award winner, Tom's work has been exhibited in England and France.
Of note is the ability to 'right click' in the above panorama and choose a range of projections - try out the 'little planet' option. Its the easiest way we have seen to both embed a panorama in a blog and provide the options for various views.
Upon uploading to 360cities.net the listing is by photographer on the front page, we quite like this as it keeps the focus on the artist rather than simply sucking images into a corporate database like other options.
One thing we would like to see is the option to 'Load' when embedding into a blog, just so the images don't automatically download but hopefully this feature will be forthcoming.
Take a look at 360Cities.net for more details and http://tommills.co.uk/ for more examples.
Soon as we get a chance we will be uploading some of our own panoramas onto the system...
the panorama show hotspots which take you to another panoramas, thats a feature i've always wanted to make use of. interesting are they created by the user or generated automaticly from the map? i take a closer look when having a free moment.
ReplyDeleteHi Tomasz, the hotspots are created automatically, the user (person who uploads the panorama) just has to select where is north in the panorama, and all hotspots can be worked out from there. Thats why some of the hotspots are not completely accurate. Hand coding your hotspots, giving pan and tilt values, will always give better results, but as 360 cities now has 11,000 panoramas this would have been impossible to do.
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