Monday, October 25, 2010

Welcome to Henry Stuart and Spherical Images Ltd

Henry Stuart is one of the latest photographers to join the growing list of contributors on Panoramic Earth. He has over 5 years experience in the industry and is the founder of Spherical Images Ltd, 'a London-based virtual tour company, providing HD quality virtual tours...allowing clients to bring their venues to the customer with unparalleled impact and quality'.

Through his work and passion, Henry has photographed many of the top locations within the UK, including the top of the Swiss Re (Gherkin) building, Royal Albert Hall and the London Aquarium. As shown below, he is not adverse to working in challenging and dangerous conditions.

Say Hello to a Komodo Dragon

Komodo Dragon (c) Henry Stuart, used by permission

Henry says one of the most scary asignments he has done was creating a Virtual Tour of the Komodo Dragon, Raja, at London Zoo. The experience involved getting close up and personal with the dragon, which attacked the camera and then chased the curator round the enclosure as he tried to rescue the camera gear from a very sticky end. Henry says the kit had to be chemically disinfected by zoo specialists and still smelt of Komodo spit months later!

They had just one take, which caught this amazing image of the dragon head on. In the end, completing the shot in the Komodo Dragon enclosure was too risky, and the image was super-imposed on a tour created of the less-life-threatening, adjacent turtle enclosure, which explains the presence of the turtle in another part of the virtual tour.


Some of his favourite images can be found Spherical Images with many being uploaded also on Panoramic Earth.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Panorama Embedding Not Possible in Wordpress

Sadly, Wordpress does not allow the use of various htm tags that are often used to embed content within blogs. These include the object, embed and iframe tags. Wordpress also disables any posting of Javascript from most sites, though there may be ways round this.

The sad result of this is that, currently, you can not easily embed content from Panoramic Earth into Wordpress blogs or pages. If this changes in the future then we will naturally shout about it!

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Embed Single Panorama Option Launched

Panoramic Earth has just launched the ability for non-commercial websites to embed individual 360° panoramas within your own websites for free. So creators of blogs, personal sites etc can now embed stunning, full screen panoramas within their pages, absolutely free. Please see the Terms and Conditions for details, register with Panoramic Earth and follow the procedure given below.

Embedding Panoramas Step 1

Below every panorama is an EMBED button, as shown below. Simply click on this to start the procedure.
embed single 360 panorama step 1
Embedding Panoramas Step 2
Select the Single Image Embedding radial and then click on Continue as shown below.


embed single 360 panorama step 2
Embedding Panoramas Step 3
Select
the height and width you want to have on your site. The code will be recalculated. Then click on Select to select all the code presented as shown below. Simply copy this and paste it into your web page. Job done. The code must be used in it's entirety, without changing any part of it. This is part of the T&C's for this service.
embed single 360 panorama step 3

Embedding Panoramas - The Result And the result is a stunning image within your website, as shown here for the Colosseum in Rome.

Panorama of Colosseum of Rome supplied by Panoramic Earth


Enjoy. If enough people ask for alternative methods of embedding, such as iframes, then we will look into implementing these too.

Monday, October 18, 2010

Embedding Single Images

This is a test post to try out tow different versions of ways to embed single images from Panoramic Earth onto blogs. At some point, at least one of these methods will become obsolete so one of these embedded images may fail to work in the future.

Javascript Embedding





Iframe Embedding


New Panoramas on Panoramic Earth