Virtual tourism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Virtual tourism refers to pre-planning alternative touristic activity before your departure, by integrating multiple digital resources to explore regions of the world without having to physically travel. It helps focus attention onto people, places and exploring changes over time!
By using the internet, travel literature (travel guides and travelogues), Journals, Papers and television visual learning courseware graphically shows information necessary to make an informed decision about which places to visit and historic or scenic byways to explore.
It is an economical activity that employs people from several different specific areas, such as journalists and photographers, geographers, editors, cameras, writers, etc... and it is one activity related to promoting nature-based or people-powered outdoor recreation involving adventure-based tourism.
The phrases panoramic tour and virtual tour are often used to describe a variety of video and photographic based media. The word panorama indicates an unbroken view, so essentially, a panorama in that respect could be either a series of photographs or panning video footage. However, of late the phrases 'panoramic tour' and 'virtual tour' have mostly been associated with virtual tours created using stills cameras. The image above is an example of what a virtual tour movie looks like when it has been 'flattened', this is also referred to as a panoramic image.
Such virtual tours created with still cameras are made up of a number of shots taken from a single point. The camera and lens are rotated around what is referred to as a nodal point (the exact point at the back of the lens where the light converges). These images are stitched together using specialist software, the movies are each resized and configured for optimal on-line use. Some 'panographers' will then add hotspots (allow user to click and walk through doors etc) and integrate plans or maps.
