There are many reasons people participate in the World Wide Panorama events: some enjoy the spirit of community and the helpfulness and enthusiasm of participants, others seek technical improvement and feedback on their work, and still others are new to QTVR and find the WWP community most welcoming and helpful. One new WWP list member from Catalonia expressed these thoughts: “I joined this list some weeks ago. I'm an absolute beginner in this matter and really impressed by the level of the comments I can read, and the panos I can see. To me, both are an excellent way to learn. So thank you very much for your work.” For all, it’s a terrific creative challenge – particularly for Don Bain, Landis Bennett and Markus Altendorff, who devote countless hours to the project and are always implementing improvements to make the process of submitting VRs, and the website itself, simpler and more user-friendly.
click here to view WWP - water projectThis last event, the Water series, saw the most change in the submission process itself as the trio worked on planned improvements and some that were ad hoc, often as the result of participant feedback. ”This has been for me the most exciting and fulfilling of the WWP events since the very first one,” says Don Bain, going on to cite the steadily increasing number of participants, wide geographic range of entries (46 countries are represented in the Water series), the overall quality of the panos, and the high number of truly exceptional ones. “But the thing that set this event apart was the overhaul of the site layout and functionality … comments from the list members helped us focus on what to aim for.”
Goals
The team had four goals for the new homepage: “less text, more eye-catching quality, something obvious to click on for the impatient or truly clueless, and fewer steps from the home page to the first view of a panorama.” And they also wanted to provide multiple language versions. The ease and speed in which translations were provided – the text was translated into 12 languages within 24 hours - would make any U.N. official beam with familial pride.
As the many kudos posted to the WWP list will attest, the trio have surpassed themselves in taking the WWP enterprise to a whole new level, largely due to changes Altendorff (who has been working on the project since the third series) made with the preparation server, changes that paved the way for the new site structure and special features and dramatically reduced the amount of labor involved. Both Bain and Bennett are quick to deflect praise. “Markus has taken the World Wide Panorama to the next level and assured that it will be a continuing showcase for quite a while. Not only is he a very good web programmer, but he also has a very good sense of aesthetics and is very capable VR photographer. This lets us all focus on making the website better and better - and it certainly has become,” enthuses Bennett. “Markus was incredible, coming up with ideas, rapidly followed by implementations, then enhancements”, Bain adds.
Submission Process
Bain describes how the submission process works: “Participants log on to the server and can browse the site as it is built. Once they join an event (such as Water) they have a page of entry fields for their data, and buttons to upload their panoramas. They see the page fill in as they work, and can preview it exactly as it will look on the final site. Certain fields are checked as they input - rules on file size and mandatory fields. They can also browse the entire site as it grows, home page, maps, and everyone's pano pages. There are management fields and lists with warnings and alerts so the management team can keep everything in line and assure completion. Added at the last minute was a mechanism for generating versions of the top-level pages in additional languages. This is all running on a dedicated computer, named Equinox, not the actual Geo-Images server. It is quite amazing.”
Below are two sample screenshots of a typical WWP preparation server page to illustrate how a user can enter information.
Updates
The latest updates include streamlined input and administration, along with some exciting new features such as the “Random Panorama” – where each event has a new random thumbnail pop up every few seconds – and the “Panorama of the Day”, featuring one randomly chosen panorama from all six events. “Since we now have 1200 panoramas on the site” Bain continues, “we can use one a day all year and not see them all - in fact since we are adding over 200 panoramas per event, we will never run through them all at that pace”. Altendorff set up an RSS newsfeed for Panorama of the Day and plans are in the works for an opt-in mailing list for the Pano of the Day, pages for coming events, and rules and procedures.
When and how did Altendorff get involved? “It started after the WWP of 9/2004, when there were a few tries at putting all the panorama locations into one map. That was the first WWP I participated in, mainly because I got my spherical pano head only sometime in August 2004, and only then started to do ‘digital’ panoramas. I saw the huge workload that Don and Landis had, and the trouble with last-minute changes, since Landis had a Filemaker Database that he exported to HTML back then. Having worked with databases and server-side scripting for a while (though I’m originally a typesetter working at a printing office in Bavaria), I wanted to try and create a map by putting all the GPS data into a table, and writing some web script that would spit out a complete set of images (for the maps) and web pages (for the links to the panoramas). After sending back and forth text tables with names, GPS values, WRONG GPS values, new tables, etc., we decided to let people handle their panorama data themselves - the idea of a dedicated preparation server was born. Don was generously donating a Macintosh Cube that's still doing this job”, he relates.
“The neat thing about that server” Altendorff continues, “is that all pages appear as if they're static - you won't find any URL that passes parameters around, except for editing, of course. Once complete, the whole site can be "frozen" into a set of HTML pages that do not require any server ‘intelligence’ to work”.
The addition of a dozen languages posed another problem. Altendorff had used an common web encoding scheme that worked fine with English, French, German and some Scandinavian languages, but didn’t support translations into special character languages like Chinese and Russian. Suddenly, each and every text needed to know how to respond to a request in a dozen languages. At first he tried masking the special characters by opening RTF files in text editors, but this was a tedious process and the text could not be corrected, so he converted the main pages over the universal UTF-8 encoding type, and then reinserted all the translations.
“We were lucky that I was on holiday this time”, Altendorff says. “All those new things were written over the course of about a week in which none of us saw much sleep. But unless Don and Landis come up with more things that need to be done, I’ll be able to spend the next week with my other hobby - creating 3D computer animation.”
In addition to the new polished look, advanced functionality and special functions, Bain makes note of the milestones that were passed: The total number of contributors now stands at about 500; the number of panos on the site is now over 1200; and there are almost 800 on the Yahoo Group mailing list. The WWP is truly world wide, presenting panos from about 50 countries. “My next concern is how to handle the bandwidth demands generated by our success!” he says.
Don Bain, Water for San Francisco
Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, Yosemite National Park, California, USA
This panorama was taken at the base of thunderous Wapama Falls, 1,341 feet (409 m) high in Hetch Hetchy, a smaller version of Yosemite Valley. Also in view are slender Tueelala Falls, 800 feet (244 m), and Kolana Rock towering 2000 feet (600 m) above the reservoir.
Landis Bennett, Sunol Water Temple
Sunol, Alameda County, California, USA
“The Sunol Water Temple, designed by San Francisco architect Willis Polk, was completed in 1910. …The city of San Francisco was built on the tip of a sandy, arid peninsula surrounded on three sides by salt water. The drinking water would have to come from elsewhere if the city was to grow. …Polk designed the Sunol Water Temple to resemble the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli near Rome…”
Markus Altendorff, Water Waiting to be Used or Abused
Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Germany
“Near the eastern edge of my hometown, the ‘Rosenbach’ (rose brook) is dammed, creating this slow-flowing pond of about two meters depth and some ten meters width that extends a hundred meters upstream. The water is rather clear. It springs from various sources scattered around the county and has its share of trout and other fishes…”
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