Tour Tips - Panorambles

Touring: the basics

Each of the panoramic tours on my site are designed to be immersive, stand-alone experiences. The tours are best enjoyed at full-screen.

My tours often include:

a title screen
a map of the landscape or property covered
a screen with information
the tour itself

Each tour consists of multiple, linked panoramic images, or locations. Additionally, each location may include audio, links to still images, and video.

At all times in my tours, there are typically three buttons, centered at the bottom of the screen:

The map icon on the left will return you to the map screen, from there you can jump to elsewhere else in the tour.

The auto-rotate icon will spin the current view automatically. If you linger without clicking, this will often kick into gear automatically. Click the same button to stop the rotation again.

Full-screen toggle. All these tours look and work best on a large monitor at full-screen. Click on the right-hand button to toggle between the web browser and full-screen. You can also exit this mode by clicking on your ESC key (often upper-right of your keyboard).

Remember to look up and down! Most of my panoramic tours over the last decade have included complete 360-scenes where you can look all the way up and down. Many interesting details and links can be missed if you just stare directly ahead.

THIS JUST IN: To improve navigation, my latest tour of Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn includes a Back Button! Before you uncork the champagne: the button will only take you back a SINGLE step in your tour (to the previous panorama). Once you’ve gone back a step, clicking it again will toggle you between the two panoramas.

Rules of the Road

It can be discombobulating exploring new spaces, even without technology involved. Here’s a few tips for keeping oriented in a Panorambles tour:

Slow and steady wins the race. While it’s fun to spin in circles, it’s easy to forget where you came from. Take some time to get used to panning about slowly in any 360-scene, and try to be deliberate when you click. What’s the hurry?
When using a mouse or a trackpad on a desktop of laptop, the links are often labeled. Hover your cursor over the link to learn where it heads before clicking.
The map is your friend. When in doubt, return to it at any time to get your bearings before diving back in.

How are these tours made?

There are a lot of single-shot panorama cameras out there (I love my GoPro), but the resolution of the images is limited. I’ve always preferred photographing my panoramas the “old-fashioned” way: taking dozens of images on a tripod with a wide-angle, high-resolution camera and stitching the results together on the computer. The average number of images is 60 per panorama. No video is used to create my panoramas.

This certainly requires a lot more work, but it also gives me a lot more control over what appears in the final image. Even better, the final image can be super-high resolution, which adds a lot more detail to my images and makes them print-quality.