Inner Hypostyle Hall, Temple Of Seti 1, Abydos, Egypt
360Cities today rolled out an embedding tool for its panoramas. This is a big deal: Before, you couldn’t just upload a panorama to a server via FTP and expect it to show up properly on a web page, like you would with a normal photo. You first had to chop the image into tiles; you also had to upload a player to the server, usually Flash-based, and then tweak it via arcane parameters or custom-made Javascript.
Now, just upload your panorama to you account at 360Cities. Not only will it show up in on the 360Cities website and on Google Earth — as of today you can also embed it on any web page you can edit, just like you would with a YouTube video.
There’s more: Because each panorama can be oriented in addition to georeferenced, you can travel between panoramas using the on-screen hotspots, with some neat transition animations that let you keep your bearings (literally:-). And if you click through to the full-screen view or a panorama’s home page, a little Google Map in the bottom left of the screen shows you in which direction you’re looking and your field of view. You can even drag the field of view to quickly look around.
The full screen option is definitely my favorite feature, for its immersive feel; but for a real mind trip right-click on a panorama and play with some of the available alternate views, such as Little Planet View or Architectural View.
And let’s not forget to send kudos to the viewing engine used by 360Cities, krpano, whose multi-resolution rendering of a panorama depending on zoom levels taps the same efficiencies as the image pyramids used by Google Maps and Microsoft Sea Dragon.
And unfortunately, just like embedded QTVRs, they don’t render in Google Reader… harrumph!
Next pet peeve… most of my QTVR/GigaPans are landscapes, not cityscapes, which makes me skeptical about uploading to a site called ‘360cities’. I admit, you make a compelling case for the utility of the site, but I’ve still got nagging doubts about embracing a site with that unfortunate name.
Ron, unfortunate name or not, 360cities has some gorgeous landscape panoramas. I can’t speak for others, but the name doesn’t prevent me from enjoying them.
Hi Ron,
Sorry about the name, :-)
But I hope you can enjoy or perhaps even join 360Cities sometime! Currently we only accept fully spherical panoramas, so if your images are in a partial or cylindrical format, you’ll have to wait for a while.
As Claudia noted, we have a great deal of non-city panoramas, many of our most beautiful images in fact are not from cities. However even with our current very fast growth, the majority of our panoramic images continue to be in towns and cities.
The link to join is here: http://www.360cities.net/account/join
All the best from Prague,
Jeffrey Martin
CEO
http://www.360cities.net