The Lost Buildings of Christchurch
Jan 1, 2012 | In commemoration and with respect I invite you to view a special Spin360 virtual tour project- The Lost Buildings of Christchurch
A priceless collection of immersive 360 degree panoramas featuring iconic Christchurch buildings and landscapes that I have photographed over the past 5 years PRIOR to the earthquakes.
It’s my intention that this project will help people around the globe gain a new perspective and appreciation of our city. To me it shows why we love Christchurch and why we want to stay. More so, to help Cantabrian’s acknowledge our loss, rekindle a pride in our city and reconnect with ‘what was’ in order to see a future that ‘can be anything we want it to be’.
PLEASE CLICK HERE: http://spin360.co.nz/christchurch-lost-buildings/index.html
Feel free to share this with your friends and family. As always- your comments are welcome...
Feedback:
Love the tribute! That is a priceless record of what used to be. Very cool. Michael Weir
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Beautiful, Stunning, Startling, So Sad, Heartwrenching, Memories, Special Moments, Tragic, Disappointment, Longing, Nostalgic, Future.
Thank you - Love Tiffany & Georgia
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Very nice work. Hope all is good in your world (& also the part you choose to live in)- Phil Cass
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What an amazing collection and body of work. We still haven't looked at them all, but what we've seen takes our breath away. Thank you! Peter Langley
Please email me your comments
Photos vs. Virtual Tours
Hi quality photos are great but even the best high quality photo can be a little deceiving, because the angle could be perfect in hiding a not so desirable aspect. What a virtual tour does allow the user to explore the destination in 360 degrees. It’s in high definition but the advantage is you can check out all the nooks and crannies, and it’s a better way to know what you’re getting.
Google has made everyone an expert. Shoppers have changed. They are heavily researching their accommodation options making the market more and more competitive. The savvy traveller has come to expect virtual tours on a website to show them what to expect and it really does make a difference to your business.
People will book with complete confidence knowing that when they get there they get what they expected and what they paid their money for. Would you risk disappointment on booking a room for your special holiday? A virtual tour completes the research. Look no further.
Put yourself in your customers state of mind because that is where your income is coming from. Improve your conversion rate by having a virtual tour on your website and impress the pants off them. Then give them a bed to sleep in. It’s a perfect fit wouldn’t you say?
High quality photos are still a must in the accommodation market, but combined with a high quality virtual tour you greatly improve your chances of a confirmed booking. And that’s money in the bank.
The First 360-degree View of Our Sun
GLOBAL | Feb 2011...2 US spacecraft are taking pictures from opposing sides of our sun and now have unprecedented images for an new perspective on what the sun is hurling towards earth.
"These things stress to us that you can't really study the Sun in great detail just by looking at a bit of it, any more than you could understand the brain by looking at a bit of it or study the Earth's polar regions by looking at the equator. You need this global view to really piece the jigsaw puzzle together." - Professor Richard Harrison Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
At Spin360 we use the same approach by taking pictures that show hotel rooms in 360 degree detail, but on an incredibly miniscule budget compared to this space project. Back on earth we can make those same conclusions about still photos versus 360 virtual tours. You really need that global view to put it all together for your customers instead of trying to tell them a story with one or two still images. It really does make that big a difference and they will appreciate it and reward you by booking with you.
Why risk losing a future customer because you haven't got a virtual tour to show them what they're missing? Scientists are curious creatures, and so are tourists. If they weren't they'd stay at home. Get the most from your website and your future clients. Call Spin360 today.
Google Unveils Virtual Tour of Worlds Most Famous Art Galleries
GLOBAL | Feb 2011... Google unveiled a new website that allows virtual tours of some of the world's most famous art galleries, featuring paintings photographed with extreme high-resolution "gigapixel" technology.
For the Art Project, video cameras mounted on trolleys recorded 360-degree tours of galleries in eleven cities around the world. They utilised their same 'street view' technology and took it indoors
- The Palace of Versailles (Versailles)
- The Van Gogh Museum, and Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam)
- Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art (Washington, DC)
- Uffizi Gallery (Florence)
- The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Frick Collection (New York City)
- National Gallery, and Tate Britain (London)
- Museo Reina Sofia, and Museo Thyssen - Bornemisza (Madrid)
- Museum Kampa (Prague)
- The State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg)
- The State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow)
- Alte Nationalgalerie, and Gemäldegalerie (Berlin)
View all the galleries at www.googleartproject.com
For your Project, Spin360 mount a digital SLR camera with a fisheye lens on a tripod and capture 360-degree tours of your space- yes, it's faster, affordable, and it makes YOU look great.
Your virtual tour can be blogged about, added to YouTube, promoted in print, liked in facebook links, tweeted on twitter and linked to and shared from anywhere including your email signature.
There’s a huge opportunity on Trademe as well. Listed today are 4662 paintings (from $20,000 to $1), 817 sculptures, 263 drawings, 2301 prints, and more. Have you looked at this as a vehicle for selling (or promoting) certain works?
Virtual Contact Lenses?
Amazing and terrifying all at once, reality augmenting contact lenses are nearly real. Like, they're almost here. Circuits and antennas and LED's in a contact lens, generating virtual imagery, Predator style. In your eyeball. read original article 
You don't need virtual contact lenses to view Spin360 virtual tours but imagine being able to download a virtual tour onto your 'EYE-Pod' and be anywhere in the world in living 3D. Who needs to travel...
Not Quite Ready for LED's in your eye balls?
Then check out some really exciting video glasses. Adding some novelty to the list are the i-3D Video Glasses that employ 3D technology to make the whole virtual imagery concept utterly personal. read more
Virtual Earth and Bing maps?
Check out a VE (Virtual Earth) aerial view in crisp close up detail of Niagara Falls
To appreciate this beautiful image of Niagara Falls we don't need to be aware of the image processing that went into creating it:
- UltraCam is flown and captures the imagery with a prescribed set of overlap
- Pre ortho processing - ingest formatting, pan-sharpening (mutispectral brought to panchromatic resolution), radiometric normalization (images brought to similar spectral range)
- Orthorectification (surface and camera distortions removed from imagery and images are geographically referenced to a coordinate system)
- Orthomosaic (individual ortho images seamed and color balanced together)
- Final radiometric look up table (final spectral adjustment applied to entire mosaic)
Do Virtual Tours pass the test?
Merely passing the “it works” test does not mean automatic project success. Successful mainstream projects result in “normal users” who are happy with the environment, find it to be compelling, continue to use it willingly and recommend its use to others. They judge the environment on how it improves their day to day experience while doing their real work, not based on whether it is a cool technology or has promising possibilities. They also have limited motivation to learn a new environment as an exploratory exercise, and must find value in the experience quickly in order to justify additional effort.
If your customers demand to see more of what you have to offer, a virtual tour could be the answer. You decide. Can you afford to miss out on business based on uncertainty from a potential buyer? If you have a unique and amazing space to show to the world, and your business depends on that exposure, ask yourself if a virtual tour could provide the solution you are looking for to improve that chance of a sale.
What’s new in the world of virtual tours?
GLOBAL | March 2010... What’s happening out there in the real world to do about virtual worlds is mind bending!
Virtual tours, image synthesis, augmented reality- whatever- the likes of some brainy and talented human beings are igniting a fireworks display of possibilities and now realities. Enter Bing- Microsoft’s version of Google- and Silverlight- MS version of Flash.
Click here and you can get a true sense of live 360 degree video, streamed to overlay on Street View maps, embedding Flickr images that have been geotagged so they can overlay them on the real spot they were taken- even old historic one upon a time photos!
What does this mean to you and your business?
Please let me know! What I can sense is a LIVE interactive global in-your-store/in-your-face shopping experience, and sight-seeing possibilities into areas never imagined. Is your little spot in the world available? Are you part of this online world for people to find you? What’s your GPS location please?
So, is your target customer the new generation who have been eating this technology for breakfast or the old generation digital immigrants tasting new technology & still learning where to go for breakfast? The line is getting more & more blurry as to where these two are meeting up for a coffee.
It’s all very exciting though, and it’s making it easier for people with just a ordinary digital camera to contribute their view of this world we live in to the global scrapbook. A scrapbook with 3D viewing, 360 degree live streamed video, and a set of GPS numbers and you’re able zoom into your living room a picture of anywhere-anything! Who’s watching TV anymore? When was the last time you turned OFF your cell phone?
Reminds me of the Star Trek depicted race called the Borg- which have a singular goal, to add the biological and technological distinctiveness of other species to their own in pursuit of perfection. “Resistance is futile.”
Links to new uses for Virtual Tours
Virtual Tour on the Trans Siberian
Google and the Russian Railways have partnered to create a virtual tour on the Trans Siberian Railway. The tour has a dedicated page on which you can ...
Jerusalem-Virtual-Tour
Station 4 of the Stations of the Cross in Jerusalem. Experience through this virtual tour the spot where Jesus meets His Mother...
Using a 360 google map as a game to find you
A London band EDITOR releases their latest song via a virtual tour- see if you can locate it!
photosynth.net
In simple terms, Photosynth allows you to take a bunch of photos of the same scene or object and automagically stitch them all together into one big interactive 3D viewing experience that you can share with anyone on the web. Photosynth is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs: the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet. Oh ya- you need to install Microsoft Silverlight (http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/default.aspx) to get them to play. And that gets to my next point-
Your turn…
If Photosynth sounds time hungry- it is. What’s your time worth? And- what are your customers going to do with it? We learned this 5 years ago when using QuickTime as a platform for viewing virtual tours. Not enough people had broadband or could even be bothered to download a 11Mb plug in from Apple (now over 30Mb). So they didn’t open the tours. At Spin360 we chose to adopt java and flash which over 95% of users have and we still believe people expect things to happen online instantly. Things are changing and evolving and we’re keeping an ever watchful eye on new & emerging technologies.
But, like anything brand new, it takes a few million people to embrace it. In the meantime, you have a travel hungry audience waiting to spend their money with you. At least you have super clear quality fast loading flash & java HD Spin360 virtual tours on your website to inspire your customers buying decision.
GOOGLE chopper view - unlimited business opportunities
CHRISTCHURCH | Nov 2009 ... Imagine you're in a helicopter hovering 1000m over your business. This is a view more and more people are able to access from Google Earth. Spin360 have taken it another step further, and can create a virtual tour in mid air virtually anywhere on earth. Bring that home to your business in New Zealand and you have a powerful visual effect that will create a buzz and get people talking about you- that's a taste of viral marketing. All we do make it yours is create hotspots or links within that image that open your own 'on the ground' virtual tour of your business, hotel, lodge or backyard in high definition super detailed fun.
Install Google Earth and travel the world in 30 minutes (more like hours or days- it can be rather addictive). The Beauty of Spin360 Helicopter view is you don't need to open Google earth- and for your customers who don't have it installed, it's an instant experience right from YOUR website.
Take a flight above New Brighton Pier
Hover above Cathedral Square
Spin360 Exclusive - Virtual Tour Provider for Heritage Hotels
AUCKLAND | March 2009... Virtual360 Limited is pleased to announce that Heritage Hotels has selected Virtual360 as the sole virtual tour provider for all Heritage Hotel and CityLife Hotel properties within New Zealand. For over 5 years, Virtual360 has been providing exceptional photography and high speed virtual delivery, thus making the decision for Heritage Hotels to select Virtual360 as their sole endorsed provider a logical next step. This arrangement helps ensure that online virtual tours for all Heritage Hotels meet the new international high standards.
"We want our hotels and conference facilities to have the best virtual tour images available on the web and are pleased to be working with Virtual360 to deliver the absolute best virtual tour product across all our properties." said Michael Hartland – Marketing Manager, Heritage Hotel Management Ltd. "Virtual360 understand what we need and deliver what they promise.."
"We are excited at the opportunity to capture high definition images that showcase each Heritage property in the best format possible- full 360 degree by 180 degree panoramas," said Karina Francks, Director of Virtual360 Ltd. "Our newest platform is fast-loading, highly compatible, user-friendly and delivers our HD images with instant full-screen capabilities."
Under the terms of each property agreement, Virtual360 will provide a comprehensive set of high quality services including HD-R photography, extensive post production values, content management, ongoing updates and scheduling utilising Virtual360’s new online project system.
Spin360 visits the Christ Church Cathedral in Nelson
NELSON | April 2009... An inspiring and dizzying display of stained glass windows. Christ Church Cathedral, Nelson, is the principal church of the Diocese of Nelson. The official seat of the Bishop of Nelson is found here in the sanctuary. An ancient word for this seat is cathedra hence the description of the building as a cathedral. See the stained glass by clicking the images above.
Spin360 and St. John gives you a close up view
inside a rescue vehicle
CHRISTCHURCH | February 2009... Spin360 supports St John and is proud to be able to place you inside this amazing vehicle for
an intimate look into an emergency ambulance and the environment of patient care. This particular St John Ambulance has a replacement cost of $200,000, including the rescue, medical and safety equipment it carries.
A unique perspective is possible using specialised camera equipment and expert post production- shot in a parking lot we were able to change the view and place this vehicle on a city street.
Click for Virtual Tour
Westpac Rescue Helicopter takes Spin360 on a ride
CHRISTCHURCH | August 2008... Spin360 is proud to support Westpac Rescue Helicopter by providing a close up view of what it's like to be inside the chopper. Unless you're a pilot or a millionaire this is the fastest way to hop inside the cockpit- there's more buttons than a 737- and you'd rather see the ambulance area this way instead of from an emergency point of view.
Click for Virtual Tour
Spin360 and Accommodate-me partner up for 360 degree access to the luxury
accommodation market
AUCKLAND | August 2008... Accommodate Me is also happy to announce a partnership with Spin 360, New Zealand’s leading virtual tour developers.“These guys are the best in the business, so we’re pleased that we can now link this technology directly into our customers’ listings.
The best virtual tours technology now on New Zealand’s best boutique & luxury accommodation website.”To view a Spin 360 virtual tour on Accommodate Me, check out listing ID 327 : Westwood Lodge in Franz Josef Glacier.Accommodate-me.co.nz is New Zealand’s fastest growing boutique & luxury accommodation website with over 400 properties throughout New Zealand.
