Who’s in the mood for a challenge? Fancy you have a good sense of direction, firm base of geography, maybe familiar with Tokyo? Can you find your way from central Tokyo to the summit of Mount Fuji?

This is no easy task. This virtual tour will test your sense of direction, memory, and, ultimately, your patience. Photographer Toshio Fuji has loaded this VR tour with 153 panoramas, or nodes, covering the 100km distance from Tokyo to Mt. Fuji, so just finding your way out of Tokyo is an accomplishment, one that I never managed to achieve.

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Each panorama contains hotspots, which you click to reach the next panorama and, in theory, move out of the city of Tokyo and towards Mount Fuji. That’s where a good memory comes into play. If you haven’t viewed the prior pano thoroughly it’s easy to choose the wrong hotspot and wind up where you started. There is a compass at the bottom of each pano to help with direction, but that’s all the help that is offered.

I found myself hopelessly lost in Tokyo. Trying to find my bearings amongst the highways and office buildings from one pano to the next was difficult and I got caught in a pano loop, similar to endlessly driving around the same strange neighborhood while lost. A couple times I ended up in a dead end, such as the inside of a store, and had to painstakingly retrace my steps. Since there are no clues or descriptions on any of the panos, many times you’re not quite sure what you’re viewing: Is this the entrance to a restaurant or the entrance to Mount Fuji?

Of course, if you give up or want to cheat you can take the easy route and use the map, accessible from the bottom of each pano. But what’s the fun in that? Besides, it’s a great way to learn your way around Tokyo – akin to exploring a city by car without a map – except here you don’t have to worry about the cost of gas, or winding up in a bad neighborhood. And that seems to be the principle behind this ‘game’: exploring one’s surroundings to the fullest.

Thankfully, the panos load quickly and are high quality. The scenery varies between the beautiful and the banal, as it does in most places, and includes many cityscapes in and out of Tokyo. The panos of Mount Fuji, with the clouds at your feet and various shrines and temples dotting the slopes, are impressive. (You can also just work your way to the summit from the base of Mt. Fuji mode on the map.)

Toshio Fuji created this impressive virtual tour in just seven days, spending three days shooting and four in postproduction. He used ‘reflection’ and ‘radiosity’ effects on the manhole found at the bottom of each pano. “The reflection is a material function used in 3D CG and shows a mirror image on the manhole,” Fuji says. “Radiosity is an illumination function and lights up the manhole with environment images. It is also known as ‘IBL - Image Based Lighting’. Such techniques are good to match the manhole to background VR.” The compositing/rendering time was 2-3 minutes per node.

Equipment
Camera; CANON EOS Kiss digital N
Lens; SIGMA 8mm
Head; custom
Stop; 4 or 8
Shutter speed; 1/800 to 4sec
Number of shots per node; 7 (2 for bottom)

Postproduction
Compositing Software; CINEMA 4D XL 9.1 and custom plugin
Converting software; Cubic Converter
Connecting software; Cubic Connecter
Map authoring software; LiveStage Pro 4.5

Email: Tofuji[at]po.jah.ne.jp