A few fascinating books about panoramic photography and immersive technologies
The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium Zone Books 
Narrative as Virtual Reality Johns Hopkins Univ Press 
Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion MIT Press 
Stretch: The Art of Panoramic Photography Rotovision |
The original idea for this site was to build a virtual reality exploration of Italy, based on
QuickTime VR (circa 1998). I soon realized that the average web user did not have the QuickTime plugin, did not know what a plugin was, did not want to download/install anything. Moreover, Microsoft was making its part in making QTVR (and many other 3rd party technologies) behave oddly in the default Windows configuration. Hence I found myself stucked in the middle of the 'New Media revolution' with a bunch of 360-degree images ready, and no potential audience. Needless to say I backed up everything and went looking for a real job. In June 2001 I started testing a digital plotter a friend of mine had bought; most people who saw those early prints felt fascinated by the odd photographic composition resulting from the 360 distorsion and by the unique immersive effect of the large format, many others also theorized about the perfect match between the holistic 360-views and the historic squares subjects, which are environments perceived as a whole by definition. Moreover I discovered that panoramic round-views images have a long history as an art form, where they posed new challenges in the development of perspective painting techniques, and are still triggering technological advances in the photographic era. The fascination of the viewer with the wide-view had been exploited as an entretainement form with 360-immersive theaters and museums' exhibits 3d effects etc of various forms (cosmoramas), from the industrial revolution era to the beginning of the 20th century. At a smaller scale 360-images constituted an important scientific visualization aid in geography, topography and architecture. The site is being developed on an absolutely random base; sometimes with a business-like attitude and lingo, sometimes as a geek experimentation lab; anyhow it remains a purely personal project. I have no plans to produce any other original content aside from gradually expanding the images' collection and providing E-commerce capabilities; I will struggle to link the most usefull and interesting resources related to Italy's cultural events, lifestyle, and travel services. the 360-degree Photographer, Graphics Designer, HTML/javascript/SQL Programmer and Sales Director (a.k.a. Luca!) |