WORLDWIDE VR PANORAMAS
A review of panoramas.dk
by Michelle Bienias
 Hans Nyberg has a mission: create a web site that links to all the VR panoramas in the world, sort them geographically for easy accessibility, and bring his passion to a wide audience. To date, he has been very successful and his site now links to over 20,000 (and growing) VRs strewn worldwide.
Whether you want to find a VR on the Taj Mahal, tour the Opera House in Sydney, Australia or virtually visit the city of Tallinn Estonia, Worldwide VR Panoramas is your best bet for finding it. The site is easy to navigate, just click on one of the continents from the top menu or search alphabetically for your chosen country. One can also search by museums and art galleries. In the past year, Hans added a new feature to his site that has proved to be extremely popular and is eliciting tremendous reviews, and traffic. Each week, Hans selects a full-screen VR, submitted from photographers across the globe, to showcase with a brief description and profile. He seems to have a preternatural instinct for unique and newsworthy VRs, with some going on to win prestigious photography awards months after Hans has profiled them (Jook Leung’s ‘Tribute in Light’ VR is a good example). The full-screen VR of the week has had enormous success, with over 27,000 unique visitors in November alone. And Hans reports that this record was broken in the first week of December. Where are these people coming from? Geographically, they’re scattered throughout the globe – Japan, U.S., Canada, South America, Russia and Europe.
What’s more, it appears that the traffic has grown organically, spread through newsletters and weblogs, or blogs. Hans reports that traffic is so heavy that AOL is now caching his site, a sure sign that the site has reached some sort of critical mass and has a broad appeal. This is wonderful news for everyone involved in VR panoramas, as we’d all like to see the audience for this technology grow. What’s particularly noteworthy is that neither the necessity of having the Quicktime VR plug-in, nor a high-speed Internet connection, is hindering viewers. Hans’ formula of high-quality full-screen VRs covering a wide variety of subjects seems to have tapped into a rich vein of curious people seeking a quality experience. And for this discovery we are grateful.
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