Panotour in Ice sculpture palace

[birdseye]

Each year in Bruges, carvers from around the world show their skills in an Ice Sculpture palace. This year, I had the permision to make a panotour of this event. After two hours of Photographing by -10°, this is the result...

http://www.360vt.be/ijssculptuur

Yvan.

[cheathamlane]

Yvan, that's really cool!

Um, just who the heck is that woman with the huge smile? :P

[birdseye]

Thank you for the comment, cheathamlane.

The women is just a figure from a Belgian movie. The theme of the icesculpture this year is build around this movie of Gnome Plop. (Maybe some dutch posters know him :)
This is the official site of the icesculpture.... http://www.ijssculptuur.be

The virtual tour will be linked to the website at the end of this year because the promoters believe that people wouldn't visit the show anymore after seeing the Virtual Tour.

Yvan.

[HansNyberg]

Very nice made. I like it.
However it suffers from the problem of disorientation which has existed since the first Quicktime VR Virtual Tour.

You need to mark on the map where you are.
And the hotspots in the panorama has to have individual tooltip text saying some thing like back to xxxxx.

Walking around at a place like this is like a labyrint,. you always go the wrong way and end up at the a same place unless you have a very clear guide which way is forward.

I always hated hotspots in QTVR Tours for walking around because of this.
I just done one but that was only for use by a single person (the architect) for a presentation.
When you know the place it is easy to find which way to go but that is impossible in this Ice Palace.

Hans

[birdseye]

Well Hans... you're absolutely right. Even I come back in the same place many times. Therefore it's indeed better to give specific marks to the hotspots which I'm gonna do right away.

[BillWard]

I notice that if I click on a "next place" icon and leave the mouse still hovering over the hotspot, then the icon remains stuck to the mouse even in the newly loaded panorama.

Very dramatic, eye catching presentation.

Bill

[cheathamlane]

Yvan:

I love the snow/ice on the tooltips -- good touch!

Brrrrr.... -10°? No thanks!

:)

Cheers,

[adriansalisbury]

I love the way you've layered the woman over the corner of the tour, very nice work. This is a great tour full of colour and interest, thanks for showing it!

[Scott Witte]

The virtual tour will be linked to the website at the end of this year because the promoters believe that people wouldn't visit the show anymore after seeing the Virtual Tour.

I would be interested in some discussion about this. At what point does a VR tour fully satisfy curiosity vs build it? How does this affect our marketing to potential clients? Our tour design or tour presentation (eg. advertising on the tour site as a revenue source)? Any thoughts?

Personally I feel no matter how good a VR tour is, it still is no complete substitute for the real experience and won't be for many decades to come. For instance, the spacial disorientation that has been noted would go away when actually there. You can make the VR experience better but not the same as being there.

On the other hand, for someone like me in the US there is almost 0% chance of my making the trip to see this in person. But the tour is definitely an eyeball grabber and encouraged me to learn a little about Bruges. On a future trip to Europe I will be much more inclined to visit the city, no matter what season.

[cheathamlane]

Yes, I'm of a similar mind -- Seeing beautiful photos of, say, Yosemite National Park only make me want to go there more. Virtual Tours of places like this achieve the same goal, I think -- enticement.

One thing that can help with Virtual Tours to increase or enhance the enticement factor is to include links to "how to get there", "more info", "visiting nnn", and so on (rather than just being closed loops where the tour itself is the destination).

?

[DMCDigital]

I get the Black Screen and no pano...was this done with strips ? See Hans' post in the forum regarding Newest version of flash and this very prob.

Mac G5/Safari,FF,Opera

Regards!

Dennis

[adriansalisbury]

I have received similar comments from potential customers who felt that they would loose visitors by showing the tour. One was a house builder who didn't want the tours as he thought people would check out the tour and not visit if they didn't like the tour whereas one of their sales staff may have been able to convince them otherwise had they visited.
I think this is crazy, it would only confirm to me whether the visit would be worthwhile or not, and when you've got kids to cart about that's even more valuable! Thankfully most of my clients agree that the benefits far outweigh any possible negatives.