Virtual Travelling

[this is the coolest thing for virtual travelling!! 360 panoramas of world heritage sites in china, southeast asia, and egypt! check out this awesome site:]
http://www.world-heritage-tour.org/

The Sweeping View From Inside a Digital Bubble
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/25/technology/circuits/25virt.html

BORDERS don't bother Tito Dupret. When Mr. Dupret, a Belgian photojournalist, travels in his homeland, an hour's drive in almost any direction will put him in another country. "A border is something I don't really understand," he said in a recent telephone interview.

So when Mr. Dupret embarked on an international mission to photograph the 754 sites, from the Statue of Liberty to the Taj Mahal, that have been registered as World Heritage sites by Unesco, it seemed apt that he would document them as interactive panoramic images. These digital pictures, which offer online viewers a 360-degree view, are essentially photographs without borders.

Since Mr. Dupret left Belgium in July 2001, he has visited 52 places and posted more than 270 panoramas at his World Heritage Tour Web site (www.whtour.net), including 10 images of the Forbidden City in Beijing that were added this month. Online viewers can explore an Egyptian pharaoh's tomb that has been closed to visitors since 1991 or take a literal spin around Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

Mr. Dupret hopes the immersive nature and universal accessibility of his photographs will stimulate interest in the World Heritage sites. Given that his travels are largely self-financed and the number of World Heritage sites is growing, Mr. Dupret, 32, expects his quest to take another 20 years. But if he still has a long way to go, his site demonstrates how far online panoramas have come in recent years.

Initially the panoramas were the province of enthusiasts who snapped a careful series of photographs, used a computer to assemble them into a horizontal array, and then displayed the results in a small portion of a browser window. Viewers could rotate these cylindrical images from side to side, but not up and down.

Several factors have combined to broaden the appeal of online panoramas. High-resolution digital cameras have reduced the need to build panoramas from scanned photographic prints. Image-stitching programs, which automatically align adjacent and overlapping pictures into a continuous field, are more adept at combining photographs seamlessly.

Programs like Apple's QuickTime VR Authoring Studio and the free PanoTools have made it possible to create spherical panoramas in which a viewer can look up and down as well as around. These images are so much more absorbing that Mr. Dupret, who made cylindrical panoramas at his first stops in Warsaw and St. Petersburg, feels compelled to return and reshoot them.

Meanwhile, viewers have become more comfortable with video-game environments, making them less likely to careen sideways as they navigate a virtual image. And faster Internet connections can now deliver lush, detailed, screen-filling images of scenic vistas and urban landmarks. The Danish photographer Hans Nyberg, who maintains a Web site (www.panoramas.dk) with links to 400 sites containing 30,000 panoramas, features a new full-screen example every week.

Jook Leung, a commercial panoramic photographer in Englewood, N.J., frequently shoots panoramic images in Manhattan (www.360vr.com). Because the scenes are often crowded with a diverse population, he said, "these are people landscapes." Mr. Leung also captures more intimate moments among friends seated around a table in a restaurant. There is always a bottle at such gatherings, Mr. Leung said, so he built a camera bracket that rotates inside the neck of a wine bottle.

Peter Murphy, a commercial panoramic photographer in Sydney, Australia, started a Web log showcasing panoramic work (www.mediavr.com/blog) in March. He said that working with such images had changed the way he looks through the camera. He is now more conscious of what is omitted from conventional photos. "You become aware of what's behind you all the time," he said. "It's kind of like being a paranoid cyclist."

Mr. Murphy is keen on the photojournalistic potential of panoramas taken at public events, sometimes hoisting his camera on a pole 20 feet over a crowd and spinning in place while he triggers the shutter. Such images are different from conventional photographs because they capture more than an instant. "The end product has this illusion of the single moment," he said, "but in fact it's cobbled together."

Not everyone is awed. Fred Ritchin, director of the online magazine Pixel Press (www.pixelpress.org) and an associate professor of photography and communications at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, said the full potential of online panoramas has yet to be realized. "Nobody's really explored what the panoramic can do on the computer," he said. Mr. Ritchin said that viewers - and photographers - are still accustomed to the conventional photograph's single viewpoint. He said he would like to see the panoramic image present multiple viewpoints to better effect.

Because panoramic images can contain links to other panoramic images, Mr. Ritchin also imagines their use in elaborate nonlinear narratives. For instance, a family portrait taken at the dinner table could contain links to panoramic portraits of each person's circle of friends. When the panorama is used this way, Mr. Ritchin said, "it becomes sort of a giant hypertext."

The site that is perhaps closest to his notion of how panoramic images might be used is 360degrees (www .360degrees.org), a social-documentary project. To raise questions about the nation's criminal justice system, individual cases are told from multiple perspectives. As prisoners, judges and family members are heard in audio clips, cylindrical panoramas depict their cells, offices and living rooms.

Mr. Murphy and others are experimenting with video-like transitions between panoramic scenes. (His demonstration can be viewed at www.mediavr.com /bronte1.htm.)

Others are working on methods to pack greater detail into a scene. At the moment, viewers who zoom into a panorama will often see the image deteriorate into blurry blocks of oversize pixels. At least one company, Zoomify, has developed software that streams additional detail into a scene as needed. When used in renderings of the cathedral and baptistry in Parma, Italy, paintings and frescoes remain distinct, if a bit fuzzy, upon close inspection (vrm.vrway.com/projects/parma).

Others are exploring augmented panoramas, which add animated characters or streaming Webcasts of real people to panoramic photographs. These experiments are welcomed by Erik Goetze, a Web designer in Palo Alto, Calif., who maintains a blog about panorama technology (www.vrlog.com). "One of the things about panoramas is they're fairly static," he said. "They typically just show a place; they don't tell a story."

Augmented panoramas can bring those scenes to life. In one online demonstration, animated bicyclists zip around a Beijing street (click on Beijing at www .throbbing.com/bikerace). In another, a woman stands in the middle of a room talking (www.fieldofview.nl /spv.php). And Mr. Murphy is working on a panoramic version of an Australian museum gallery so that viewers can look around the room while a curator describes each work.

Mr. Dupret will have to wait for these advances to catch up with him. He travels with a small backpack, half of which is taken up by his camera, monopod, laptop computer and other electronic gear. To produce each panorama, he usually shoots 10 horizontal images, then 9 more pointing up and another 9 pointing down. It can take him up to two days to stitch the final image.

For now, Mr. Dupret intends to focus on World Heritage sites that are not often seen online, which means he hopes to spend much of the next year in India, Pakistan and Nepal. Nor is he daunted by the prospect of spending the next 20 years crossing borders. "The more you eat roads, the more you want to eat them."

Caught in the Iraqi Dramatics

Caught in the Iraqi Dramatics
By DAVID BROOKS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/23/opinion/23BROO.html

During the first half of the 90's, I spent some time on the "Whither NATO?" circuit. I'd sit in stately European palaces with diplomats, parliamentarians and multilateral men who used the word "modality" a lot, and we'd discuss the post-cold-war international order.

There were disquisitions on multipolarity, subsidiarity and post-nation-state sovereignty. I recall a long debate on whether the post-cold-war United States would face east or west, as if we were phototropic.

The people at these conferences tended to be paranoiaphiliacs. They believed there was a secret conspiracy running the world, but they were in favor of it because they thought they were it.

But even as we were ratiocinating in those palaces, the Russians were tossing out Gorbachev, the Ukrainians were breaking away from Russia and the Serbs were massacring their neighbors.

Far from mastering events, the poor souls who attended summits found history moving in unfathomable directions. Their careful negotiations over a new global architecture often had nothing to do with reality. The economic-reform plans they proposed for Russia had nothing to do with a country that was being taken over by mafioso. I recall the dispiriting moment — at a stately manor in Oxfordshire, I believe — when I realized I didn't really believe in foreign policy. Most problems are domestic policy to the people who matter most.

All of this comes to mind as President Bush goes to the U.N. to discuss a resolution on the reconstruction of Iraq. The U.S. and the Iraqis face a series of tortuous problems together: how to quickly strengthen the Iraqi military, but not in a way that allows it to dwarf Iraqi civilian rule; how to respect the Shiite clergy without allowing clerical domination of education and social policy; how to open the nation up for foreign investment, but not in a way that the locals feel their country is being plundered. Nation-building is too grand a phrase for much of the work that is being done; it's neighborhood-building in all its granular specificity.

But the talk around the Security Council is 8,000 miles above all that. There are discussions about which flow chart the U.S. administrator Paul Bremer should fit into. There are lofty and vapid formulations about moving from the "logic of occupation" to the "logic of sovereignty." This weekend, Dominique de Villepin published an essay in an Austrian paper in which he (of course!) called for an international conference to supervise the administration of Iraq.

The more you look at the Security Council negotiations, the more they resemble one of those horrible divorces in which the children get ignored because the parents are caught up in the psychodrama of each other's perfidies. You've got the usual Franco-American dramatics. You've got the Germans trying to make everyone like them. Meanwhile, the actual needs of actual Iraqis never seem to come in for much discussion.

It's time to acknowledge that the reconstruction of Iraq is too important to be left to the foreign policy types, who are trained to think too abstractly to grapple with the problems that matter.

The good things that are happening in Iraq are taking place far below the level of grand strategy. On Sunday, 18 bankers and civil servants from 11 central and Eastern European countries came to Iraq to describe the lessons they had learned in moving from tyranny to democracy. Every day, U.N. humanitarian workers, far removed from the marble halls of the Security Council, risk their lives to feed and clothe Iraqis. Every day, U.S. military officers spend millions of dollars building schools and tackling neighborhood issues. That's the work that gives Iraqis hope. Seventy percent of Iraqis expect their lives to improve over the next five years, and two-thirds want coalition forces to stay for at least a year, according to a recent Zogby poll.

Over the long term, we need to create an apolitical reservist force, made up of of businesspeople, administrators and police officers who have concrete experience in moving societies from dictatorship to democracy. In the meantime, we need to focus on serving the Iraqis first, second and last. We don't need to get caught up in a distracting round of lofty debates among the world's Walter Mitty Metternichs, who treat the Iraqi people as pawns in their great game-power struggles.

Looking Out, and In

Looking Out, and In
By DAVID BROOKS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/20/opinion/20BROO.html

If you had opened the newspapers and magazines 50 years ago this week, you would have found the rapturous reviews that greeted Saul Bellow's first great book, "The Adventures of Augie March." Virtually unknown, Bellow had set out to write the Great American Novel, which was audacious because the character he chose to typify the mainstream American spirit was a Jewish kid living in the Jewish neighborhood of Humboldt Park in Chicago.

The second thing he did was to redefine American heroism. What was epic about America, he wrote, was not pioneers settling the West: it was city kids rising from poverty.

Bellow's character, Augie March, grew up in a single-parent household but never settled for the near at hand. America to him meant the "universal eligibility to be noble." So he was always venturing out among con men, rich girls, nut cases, patrons and aspiring moguls. He describes his adventures comically, but underneath there is his unshakable idealism. Inspired by America, Augie doesn't settle for a life that is unworthy of himself. "I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor," he concedes. "Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America."

The Jews left in the 60's, Puerto Ricans moved in, and at first the neighborhood tumbled into chaos. There were riots, fires and welfare dependency, and sidewalks crumbled so badly the kids used the upheaved chunks of concrete as caves.

But then came the stirrings of Puerto Rican pride and ethnic nationalism. A man named José E. Lopez, who grew up in Puerto Rico without water or electricity, began battling the stereotype, which many in the neighborhood had internalized, that Puerto Ricans were lazy. He began teaching Puerto Rican culture and history. Lopez was and is a radical, and amid posters celebrating socialism and anticolonialist struggle, dozens of institutions were formed: cultural centers, day care centers, a multicultural alternative high school. You talk with people in the neighborhood today, and they seem to be always rushing to or from some meeting at some council.

In the 1980's, gentrification threatened to push Puerto Ricans out of Humboldt Park. Lopez and his friends created a buffer zone, starting at Division Street and Western Avenue, that would remain permanently Puerto Rican. Two metal Puerto Rican flags now stake out that intersection. There is a Puerto Rican walk of fame, Puerto Rican symbols on lampposts, and a "No Yuppies" sign at the coffeehouse.

Amid those socialist posters, small businesses were hatched. Xavier Nogueras was a community organizer who founded an advertising agency and is now opening an upscale restaurant on Division Street. The street is now clean and safe, with bustling locally owned stores, which no longer need grilles over the windows. The nearby park is immaculate, with the grand old boathouse cleaned and restored. In many ways, Humboldt Park is nicer than it ever was.

But stubborn problems remain. Eighty-five percent of the students who come to the area's Roberto Clemente High School are unprepared for high school work, and most will drop out. There is not a single male student, or a single black or Hispanic boy or girl, who tests above grade level. The school is stocked with computers and energized teachers, but most students don't even think about their long-term futures. Instead, many join gangs and go to jail, and once they have felony convictions on their records, they find it very hard ever after to find jobs.

The biggest difference between the neighborhood in Bellow's day and now is that then, the path to success was through assimilation, whereas now it is through ethnic self-determination. Augie ventured out, and shed some community bonds. Now, few venture out. Downtown Chicago — the Loop and the lakefront — is a 10-minute drive away, but is also a foreign country. Few go there.

To be honest, I much prefer the assimilationist model. Instead of encouraging people to spend their lives around the same few streets, it opens up the wide possibilities of America. But nobody in the neighborhood believes in that model anymore, and the more immediate problem is that so many kids in the neighborhood are raised without any model, either Saul Bellow's or José Lopez's. They live without any idealism, and hence without any sense of the universal eligibility to be noble.