Friday, April 19, 2002 |
10:53 - Virtual Parks-- Best Use of QTVR Yet
http://www.virtualparks.org/
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An enterprising photographer has decided to make QuickTime VR panoramas of just about the entire national park system of the western US and Canada. It's-- well, here's what it said in the QuickTime Newsletter that pointed me toward the site:
“Now that humanity completely dominates and influences the natural environment, my vision is to use QuickTime as an artform in the 2000s to help preserve what precious little wilderness is still left.”
So says Erik Goetze, publisher of Virtual Parks, a website with hundreds of incredibly photographed, large-scale QuickTime VR panoramas of North American wilderness.
Let Erik take you from ghost towns to lighthouses, from fields of wildflowers bursting with life, to the eerie, desolate landscape of California’s Mono Lake. Explore the John Muir Trail, or witness the first sunset of the new millennium off Point Lobos at California’s Big Sur.
Browse panoramas by geography, visual theme, best-of-site, or by alphabetic index.
It's a really nice site-- very smoothly navigable, fast, and very full of some of the best VR content I've ever seen. Give it a look, if you have any interest in the outdoors. And I hope you do. You don't have to be freakishly obsessive about it like I am (I spent the drive in this morning looking at every panorama and mentally adding different kinds of trees and different road systems and deleting buildings and imagining the Valley of Hearts' Delight-- as Silicon Valley was once known-- having developed in any number of different possbible ways), but I suspect that just about anybody will find something to like.
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