 Durant
& Cheryl Imboden'sEurope for Visitors europeforvisitors.com |
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Armchair London
ABOVE: The opening screen from Explore St. Paul's Cathedral.Clicking the dots in the diagram beneath the video window takes you to different areas of the building. Thumbnails on the right launch narrated discussions of architectural, artistic, or historical details. Archived article Multimedia CD-ROMs don't get much attention these days, in part because so much great material is available free of charge on the Web. But until we all have high-speed access to the Internet with cable modems or DSL, there are some things that still load faster and run better from a CD-ROM--such as Explore St. Paul's Cathedral and Explore Parliament from the Armchair Travel Company of London, England. Each title comes in two versions: a "tourism" edition and a "scholastic" edition that adds a book's worth of extra keyword-searchable text and biographies plus "guided tours" that can be customized for a grade level or course topic. A massive effort went into the development of each title. The tourism edition of Explore St. Paul's Cathedral (shown above) contains more than 6,000 photos, 56 QTVR panoramas, and 200 mini-movies--along with narration and extensive text. The images were shot in three intensive nights of work that required moving 1,000 chairs and installing 100 spotlights before filming. Explore Parliament contains an even greater quantity of material on the Houses of Parliament and the Royal Palace of Westminster. (For a screen capture, see page 2.) Next Page > View sample panoramas > Page 1, 2
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