When
Photography is to be done in the days leading up to the December Solstice - from Saturday, December 18 to Tuesday, December 21. The Solstice is the first day of winter in the northern hemisphere, the beginning of summer in the southern hemisphere.

Theme
The theme for this event is "Sanctuary", a term with many meanings, open to a wide range of creative interpretations

Sanctuary - originally, a consecrated place, a place where sacred things are kept.

The sanctuary was the part of a Greek temple and later a Roman basilica where treasure was kept. In the Jewish Temple of Jerusalem it was where the Ark of the Covenant was kept, the sanctum sanctorum or holiest of holies. Roman basilicas evolved into Christian cathedrals and churches and the meaning evolved. In churches the sanctuary is defined as the part of the church where the altar is.

Sanctuary can thus be taken literally - churches, cathedrals, basilicas, temples, mosques. Religious buildings are often of great beauty, the focus of community pride and a showcase for its artistry and wealth. They are repositories of history and art, sometimes the site of historic events. Churches are among the best places for cubic panoramas, often having elaborately decorated floors and ceilings.

By tradition fugitives could not be pursued into or arrested in a sanctuary, providing another meaning: a place of safety and refuge. This concept appears in various cultures. In Hawaii for example, the famous Pu'uhonua O Honaunau (and others) offered refuge from the harsh kapu system. The "Underground Railroad" in the pre-Civil War U.S. sheltered slaves moving north to freedom. Entire countries have been legal refuges for fugitives from persecution or prosecution.

A sanctuary can also be seen as a refuge not just from the law, but from strife and turmoil. The Greeks and Romans recognized sacred groves and forest clearings as sanctuaries. We now use the term to describe areas where wildlife is protected from hunting and predation. Wildlife refuges large and small exist all over the world, especially to shelter migratory birds.

A sanctuary can be any place of refuge, a shelter from the pressures of life, a refuge from stress and danger. It can be a library, a private club, a corner of the garden, a lonely hilltop, a coffee shop, or a friendly tavern. It could be a basement workshop, a tree house, an artist's studio, a vacation cabin, a favorite campsite, even a hotel room or cruise ship cabin. People seek shelter in all kinds of places.

In the novel "Snow Falling on Cedars" a hollow tree is a personal sanctuary for several of the characters - the real tree actually exists in a park. To our ancient ancestors a cave would be a sanctuary. In the Cold War years some Americans built backyard fallout shelters as sanctuary in the event of nuclear war. Switzerland has an elaborate system of underground shelters dating back to World War II. For migrating birds a sheltered garden or thicket provides life-saving sanctuary. For Howard Hughes it was a hotel in Las Vegas. For a house cat it might be a cardboard box.

Sanctuary seems a topic appropriate to the time of year (at least at higher latitudes in the northern hemisphere), when the weather turns hostile and we look inwards to the comfort of home and community. In much of the world it is a time of religious observance and festivity, of family reunion, and of giving.

We look forward to seeing all the interpretations of the concept of sanctuary, from grand architectural masterpieces to unique personal statements.

Format
All submissions must be in QuickTime format, a self-contained QTVR file, either a panorama or an object. Limits for dimensions and file sizes will be specified. Full information will be posted on the web site soon.

There will be a week after the shoot for participants to prepare their imagery and captions. Preliminary versions of the site will be available to participants only, with a final public version targeted for January 1, 2005.

Submission of imagery and captions will be easier than ever (thanks especially to Markus Altendorff), with browser-based forms.

A few enhancements have been added. All captions should be submitted in English, but there will be provision for versions in other languages. There will be a new section of participant biographies (optional), linked to panoramas in this and previous events. Another optional field will allow you to tell the personal story of your day of panorama shooting for the event.

As before, this will be a non-commercial event, with the following aims:
- to foster the international community of VR enthusiasts
- to increase general public awareness of VR photography
- to create a showcase for our work
- to create links between VR sites

Summary:
• photography must be done December 17-21, 2004
• one panorama per person only
• no multi-node panoramas, except...
• hotspots within a panorama must link to nodes on a different server
(i.e. not GeoImages) and must open in a new window
• panoramas must be self-contained Quicktime movie files, either
panoramas or objects
• an external sound file can be submitted also
• the panorama should be submitted in one or two sizes - standard is
mandatory, fullscreen optional
• the standard size panorama file size can be no more than 700k, but
less than 400k should be your goal
• the standard size panorama can be displayed no more than 700 pixels
wide - 570 by 320 pixels is recommended
• the fullscreen version file size can be no more than 3mb, but less
than 2mb should be your goal
• it doesn't matter what size the fullscreen is set to display at, the
html page will expand it to full screen width automatically (780 by 440
pixels is suggested)

All work submitted will be copyright by the individual photographers, and no further use will be made of it without individual permission (other than for purposes of review and publicity, and thumbnail links on the FullScreenQTVR site).

If you are interested in the World Wide Panorama please join our group and get on the mailing list. Go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wwp/ and sign up. You don't need to be registered to participate, but it is a good way to keep up with what's going on.

The World Wide Panorama is sponsored by the Geography Computing Facility at the University of California Berkeley. The site is hosted by The Geo-Images Project. This is a non-commercial project, done simply to create enthusiasm for VR photography, and provide an outlet for our collective creativity.

The World Wide Panorama events and web sites have been organized and created by Don Bain and Landis Bennett, graphics by Kat Kalamaras, maps and programming by Markus Altendorff.

For more information:
-Visit the web site at http://GeoImages.Berkeley.edu/wwp.html

Related Articles:
- Learn about the latest panoramic viewing engine - SPi-V - in Aldo Hoeben's SPi-V Engine
- The Original World Wide Panorama Event, March 20, 2004
- World Heritage - A World Wide Panorama, June 19-21, 2004
- Bridges - A World Wide Panorama, September 18-22, 2004
- Sanctuary - A World Wide Panorama, December 18-21, 2004