HOWZAT

www.seeoxford.com?? ??

??Access?? is a watchword for leading univer-sities these days ?? the impressive response of Oxford??s chemistry department has been to bring together panoramic tours of many of the town??s world-renowned attractions at one portal. Like a don??s bookshelf, the arrangement is haphazard but full of pleasant surprises, and anyone planning a real-life visit to the dreaming spires will benefit from the ??sober look at 60 of Oxford??s pubs ??. The celebrity tours are less successful ?? Tolkien??s Oxford consists of tedious suburban residences that make the Shire seem exciting. More impressive is the architectural drama of the Natural History Museum. Some panoramas look suspiciously like two 35mm slides taken in opposing directions with a fisheye lens, then stitched together, producing an inferior, and disorienting, VR experience.

ANCIENT GREECE

www.stoa.org/metis ??

This immense educational res- ource extends from the walls of Troy to those at Mycenae ?? perhaps only Alexander the Great had more of the ancient world at his beck and call. The Metis project has a singular vision: to stitch together 50,000 photographs by the American Bruce Hartzler. Their value to archeology buffs and classics scholars is enhanced by numerous text documents, and where better to plan a little Acropolis sightseeing? As you mouse around your window on the classical world, the menu bar acts as a keen guide ?? revealing significant finds and occasionally exhorting you to ??scroll further??. The cursor changes every time a new panorama can be accessed, encouraging visual exploration, while a small left-hand window contains a top-down map view. Despite its all-round good sense, however, the wonder of the antiquities themselves is diminished by the small size of the image window.

UNESCO

www.world-heritage-tour.org ??

Another labour of love, this ambitious directory aggregates panoramas of Unesco??s World Heritage Sites in China, Egypt, Thailand, the Philippines and more. Its success proves that, essentially, anyone who has a laptop and a decent digital camera, and who is not easily made dizzy, can produce impressive panoramas to transport the desktop explorer. Unless you want to sit through Tomb Raider again, the grand sweeps of Angkor Archeological Park, in Cambodia, are the closest many of us will get to these magical Buddhist temples. The tour would benefit from being better linked: the viewer must rely on the breadcrumb trail beneath the picture window to move around each site, rather than pointing and clicking within the landscape itself.

ANCIENT BRITAIN

www.discoverychannel.co.uk/rebuildingthe
past/_home

This website accompanies a recent Discovery Channel documentary charting the construction of a replica Roman villa on a farm in Hampshire. A beautifully drawn Flash model of the villa, complete with slave toiling at the vegetable patch, is the starting point for a room-by-room tour of 360-degree photographs. Loading the iPix views is achingly slow, however, even within the pint-size window, and the text dwells on the construction of the rooms rather than the lives of the people who would have populated them. Not as ??media-rich?? as other sites, but new panoramas of mosaics and paintings from the villa??s interior may add interest when they appear in the spring.

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