Virtual tour - The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens is one of the most spectacular places you can visit in the U.S. It was founded in 1919 by Henry Edwards Huntington, the famous railroad and real estate developer, at the place that later became the city of San Marino. On its 120 acres of gardens you can find one of the world's largest botanical collections of over 14,000 different species of plants, three art galleries and a library with magnificent collections of paintings, sculptures, rare books, manuscripts, and decorative arts.

Now you can explore The Huntington virtually. Yesterday, we posted 27 interactive panoramas taken throughout the whole garden - they are all available on 3Dtour.cz. The scene below is a 360° view on the small part of Desert Garden which is one of the largest and oldest assemblages of cacti and other succulents in the world:

3Dtour.cz featured on ProgrammableWeb

Last month, as the 3Dtour.cz project is partially based on Google Maps API it was submitted to ProgrammableWeb, a website dedicated to all kinds of mash-ups and APIs. 3Dtour.cz was awarded a "Mashup of the Day" and soon gained high user ranking and popularity, both being in top 10% of all the sites listed. This is exactly the type of feedback that stimulates our enthusiasm for keeping the project up and running and bringing new features to our users.

Neverheless, nothing is perfect so we are open to any critisizm as well. Is there anything on 3Dtour.cz you would wish to be changed or designed in a different way? Is there any functionality glitch? Are you satisfied with the quality of the virtual tours themselves? Any comments and suggestions are welcome.

Virtual tour - Loreta Square in Prague

Just to give you an example of how the virtual tour looks like you can enjoy a virtual visit to one of the most beautiful european cities and increasingly popular destination - Prague, capital of the Czech Republic. The view below was shot at Loreta Square in the historical district of Prague.



How to use our virtual tours:
Looking around the interactive panorama is very easy and intuitive: for panning and tilting click the left mouse button and drag the mouse to any desired direction. While panning/tilting, you can also use the "control" and "shift" keys to zoom in and out. Alternatively, the same functionality is provided by the controls on the bottom bar of the virtual scene.

3Dtour Blog launched

It has been about three months now since the new Virtual Tour project at 3Dtour.cz was launched. At this moment you can find there nearly 100 interactive panoramas from different locations mainly from Czech Republic, but there are also some from Slovakia and California. Indeed, there's much more to come soon as new virtual panoramic scenes will be added more-less regularly.

This blog will be dealing with a variety of virtual tour topics as well as featuring some live examples of high resolution spherical panoramas. Panoramic photography itself is almost as old as the subject of photography. However, to make a panorama interactive one needs to have a computer and appropriate software capable of displaying such an image in the real time, which is nowadays almost any computer but it wasn't like this some 5-10 years ago. Thus, the "art" of virtual tours is relatively new subject which gained significant popularity in just about last two years or so.

If you find this topic the same hot, stay tuned!