Can you tell us about your backgrounds and the history of Armchair Travel?

William Beckett and I met in 1985, when we were both doing interactive, videodisc-based products using virtual tour systems; he was doing an educational game product, and I was at Visual Data Systems in London doing a series of virtual tours for engineering and safety in the North Sea oil industry. One of these, our Gullfaks-A safety training virtual tour, included almost 40km of travel about the oil platform, and was shown on BBC's Tomorrow's World in 1986.

A few years later, when Beckett was consulting to Waddingtons Games, he learned of a project to do a version of Cluedo for Mac, PC and CDi platforms, and he immediately thought of a virtual tour-type game. He then contacted me, and we presented a storyboard to Waddingtons and Parker Brothers (USA) to do the game. This was accepted and we produced the programme using our Virtual Travel(R) technology at Holker Hall in Cumbria. A version of that game is still selling today under our Foul Play brand name.

After this project, we did a number of other virtual tours for various industries, and were approached by BMG Bertelsmann in 1996 to do a CD-ROM series including Parliament, St Pauls Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. We completed the first two of these, and then BMG pulled out of the CD-ROM business. We inherited the products, completed them ourselves, and they continue to sell well. The Explore Parliament product includes 72 panoramas, 4,000 frames of connecting travel video between the panos, 2,500 hotspots, and over 350 mini-movies about people and objects found in the Houses of Parliament. The programme also includes a search-engine, and a guided tour facility, and even a way to construct an automatic "best route" guided tour based upon the search-engine results. This system is also used in our Explore St Paul's Cathedral programme.

Armchair Travel also provides services to several military organisations and manufacturers in the UK, such as the Royal Navy and BAE Systems. These include the Challenger 2 Tank, a 130-pano tour of a destroyer, HMS Exeter (including connection travel video), and the largest turntable "object movie" done to our knowledge: the M777 155mm Howitzer. A special turntable was built to allow the 5 tonne gun to be balanced and moved around in a 20 metre-diameter circle. We have filmed the howitzer over 5 different stages of development during the last 4 years.

Armchair Travel are also attempting to provide "consumer" virtual tours online, as you know. If we can make the Explore the Taj Mahal website more profitable, then we will continue to commission and produce these ourselves. The Chat & Tour(tm) system is our next addition to the website to attempt to increase our subscriber rate.

We commissioned the Taj project ourselves, based on interest from our directors in investigating the possibilities of paid entertainment/edutainment on the Internet. They are still waiting!

You’ve made your views known on the merits of the iPix and Ford Oxaal patent claims, namely that they are without merit based upon “prior art and obviousness of engineering”, referring to MIT’s work in the genre in the late 1970s. For the benefit of those unaware of MIT’s work within this context, could you expand on how this would impact iPix’s patent claims?

At MIT we implemented a wide range of anamorphic photographic mapping techniques, primarily in the Aspen Movie Map projects of (approx) 1976-1980. In addition, anamorphic mapping technologies of various sorts have been around for hundreds of years. To implement these on computers is a simple engineering task. So, for obviousness, I see 100% for most software today. But the corporations with the big bucks to keep pounding on patent examiners, whose offices are understaffed and undereducated, will almost always win.

As the founder and first president of the iqtvra (1996-98) you are uniquely qualified to comment on the association’s founding mission and objectives, how they have evolved over the years and your thoughts on the future direction of the association.

When I founded the IQTVRA (with a number of other extraordinary people at the time), I had hoped to provide much more than has been possible in real terms. This is disappointing, but since Apple doesn't really seem to support QTVR anymore (e.g. no update to QTVR Authoring Studio for years), it is not surprising that this industry has its difficulties. And the iPix attempts to stifle competition have had a significantly negative spoiler-effect on the industry as well.

But given the resources of the current directors of the IQTVRA, I think the fact that the group has survived is a great achievement! This is due, primarily, to the concerted efforts of a small number of people, particularly the tenacious Loren Price.

Related Articles:
Armchair Travel's Taj Mahal virtual tour project.
Armchair Travel's Experience with Micropayments.

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Email: vr(at)armchair-travel(dot)com