Associated Colleges of the South
Technology Fellowship Report

While the interactive map allows a visitor to "move" through the garden and to see garden features from a variety of viewpoints, it does not allow the visitor the ability to "look around." The virtual reality panoramas created by Reality Studio, published by MGI Software gives the visitor that ability. The new panorama tour I have added to my site selects eighteen points the garden at which a visitor may "stand" and view his or her surroundings through 360 degrees. The software also enables visitors to view the interiors of several garden buildings in the same way. You may take the panorama tour by following this link.

The Technology Fellowship allowed me to purchase the software (under $200), to purchase the least expensive Sony Digital Mavica camera and a wide-angle lens, (under $700 total) and to defray part of my travel expenses to England where I took the digital photographs to use for the panoramas.

In order to create a panorama, I set up my tripod at an appropriate spot, made sure that it and the camera were level (to avoid image distortion), and took a series of overlapping photographs through 360 degrees. These digital images are saved to a floppy disk as jpeg files. Immediate review of the images allows the photographer to be sure that the images are in focus and have the proper exposure. Using a digital camera also reduces the possibilities of mistakes as compared to using print or slide film, which must first be processed and then scanned before the Reality Studio software can transform them into panoramas.

The software takes those images and "stitches" them together to form a complete panorama. It also allows the user to select from a series of "lenses" that correspond to the relative wide-angle or telephoto quality of a series of images. Another part of the software package allows the photographer to create hotspots within the image that can be linked to other web addresses or to other panoramas. I have not used these hotspots on my Stowe pages, but I have done some rough experimentation with panoramas of Birmingham-Southern's campus. These can be seen by following this link. The panoramas are relatively small image files (200-800 KB) that load fairly quickly using a Java applet. The Reality Studio software provides the image files, the ivr (virtual reality) files, and the html codes to copy and paste into a web page.

The only problems I encountered with the process had to do with changing weather conditions and the unexpected limitations of the software to handle more than 24 images to stitch into a single panorama. I had not expected that moving clouds on a windy day would change the light enough to vary my exposure settings in the time it took to take the images for a single panorama. Luckily, the software blends the edges of the individual images well enough to allow for relatively seamless transitions from one to the next. Also, for a reason I have yet to discover, the software refused to create a panorama out of more than 24 individual images. On certain panoramas, I chose to use my telephoto setting to produce better detail in each image, but this choice resulted in a greater number of images to make up the 360 degrees. I discovered later that the software will create partial panoramas so that, for example, visitors can "stand" in the doorway of a garden building and "look" to the left and right and back again (as if following a tennis match) without looking behind themselves.

Ongoing assessment of the quality of the Stowe site and its various tours, including this new panorama tour, will be done in the course evaluations of my course in literature and the arts, EH 349, as well as in response to comments I receive from visitors to the site. I am pleased to report that, during the week of 25 September 2000, my site was listed by the BBC Web Guide as one of the thirteen best botanical garden sites on the Web.

Because the software package also allows the user to create 3-D images of objects, it provides appropriate teaching technologies for use in courses in the visual and performing arts. A number of museums already use this technology to bring virtual visitors into a room full of art and to allow them to click on individual pieces of art on the walls in order to link to pages devoted to each piece. I can see fine art and theatre art faculty using the software to allow students to tour campus galleries or theatrical production sets. Art exhibitions and theatre sets could easily be archived for "visits" by future students. A colleague of mine who teaches classics imagines outdoor panoramas of parts of Rome, in which imbedded hot spots take a visitor into re-created interiors of buildings or to subsequent panoramas. The same sort of applications could be used in history and literature classes when it is appropriate for students to visualize the place where something happened or where someone lived or worked.