Some websites now include 360° or panoramic views
of places in the world. (VR is also a term that is used to describe videos that walk
you through places such as museums and hotels.)
When viewing a VR panorama picture, you have control over the viewer and can
pan around the picture 360° in either direction as well as pan up and down.
Some viewers also let you zoom in and out of the scene and, of course, you
can stop
the motion at any time.
When a website has VR panoramic pictures, you will need
to download and use the appropriate software to show the images.
Although Apple's QuickTime VR (QTVR) and IPIX are two of the most popular VR
formats, there are other formats that you may encounter as well. You
will normally be prompted to download the necessary software at the time you
try to view a VR panorama picture if you don't have the necessary viewer.
To download some of the free VR Panorama viewers, go to our
Web Multimedia page.
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Virtual Paris |
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We have added links to VR
panoramic pictures for many of the cities and places in our
World Links
section.
If present, you will see it as shown here. Just click on
the name to go to the VR panoramic website. |
Searching for VR pictures on the web. To search for VR pictures
for a place in the world, enter the name of the place + one or more words
that indicate VR pictures. You may have to try different words to get good
results. Here are some of the terms that are commonly used:
Virtual Reality,
VR, VR panoramic, VR panoramas, 360 degree pictures, 360° interactive and
virtual tours, virtual panoramic tours, virtual reality tours, and VR tours:
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Example search results using different VR terms:
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1 |
Rome virtual tours |
Best results - the first
few hits are excellent virtual tours of Rome - (2.1
million hits) |
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2 |
Rome Virtual
Reality |
Still good results
- the first
few hits are excellent virtual tours of Rome - (1.7
million hits) |
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3 |
Rome
VR panoramas |
Still good
results - the first few hits similar to #1 search. (0.4 million
hits) |
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4 |
Rome 360 degree
pictures |
Not good
results - missing the best websites that were present in #1 and
#2 (0.9 million
hits) |
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5 |
Rome 360° interactive |
Not good
results - missing the best websites that were present in #1 and
#2. Also many of the first hits were hotel 360° pictures (1.5 million
hits) |
Panoramic Travel Galleries.
Here is a list of some of the websites we have found that have VR
panoramic pictures of the world. If you encounter a website in a
language other than your own, try the
free
Google Translation
service. They may have a translation between the other language and yours.
If so, all you do is just paste the URL of the web page into their
translation box and click Translate. It will also continue to
translate any pages you go to within that website.
Hey, the panoramic picture is in black and white and blurry. What
happened? Relax, you will notice that if you don't have a high
speed connection like DSL. While it is downloading the 360 degree
color picture, your browser will usually display the initial image sent in
black and white (monochrome) and it will be blurry. Eventually sections in
color, and in focus, will appear and eventually you will have a complete
panoramic picture you can move around. Just left-click your mouse and hold
the button down once the full color picture is displayed and then move your
mouse in the direction you want to go.
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Amazon.com has a
few of the VR panorama software and DVD products offered by some
of the websites shown below. Amazon.com hasn't catalogued
VR products very well. Here are the best search results we
found. |
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Virtual Visits
Virtual Tours
Four Chambers Studio |
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360TravelGuide.com
***
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The world's largest free access panoramic
image library virtual tours, interactive maps, travel
guides & more. Select a country, then a location
and then a virtual tour. They have
360° panoramic
tours from all over the world. |
360Parks.com. They
have online 360 degree panorama pictures of U.S. parks from
their collection of CD-ROMs they sell. This includes a
full-screen-viewing option.
Blakeway Worldwide Panoramas.
Excellent worldwide VR tours.
Don Bain's Virtual
Guidebooks. ***
Excellent and extensive VR panoramas for the Western United
States, Alaska and the western provinces of Canada. You'll also
like the easy-to-use interface. Well-done Don!
Destination360.
Excellent virtual tours around the world.
Immersion360. This is an excellent French Virtual Tour
website. The link will take you to the Google translation of
their Panoramas 360 page into
English.
PanoGraph.hu - VR panoramas made by
Hungarian Tamas D.Varga. The site is in English.
Panorama 360 -
This is a personal Spanish website with a QTVR and java panorama collection
of places
in Spain. The link will take you to the Google translation of
their home page into English.
Panoramic Earth
*** - They have combined a
Google map with 360 panoramic photographs of places on the map
for a country plus they include travel information. Worldwide
coverage. Well Done!
Panoramas.dk -
Excellent and comprehensive. Links to
other websites around the world with VR panoramas.
The Youth Online Club. A short list of interesting VR tours
around the world.
Panoramics Worldwide -
Offers panoramic pictures from many countries around the world.
VRWay - Offers
Quicktime VR panoramic images from Europe, Thailand, and the
United States.
World in Motion VR
- Try their
CubicVR and
MotionVR Samples. You can also see demonstrations of their
DVD collections which you can buy.
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