Can you tell us about your background ?
I was born in Chicago, spent my baby years in Germany, and then my childhood in the UK. Now I live in Prague for the last 8 years. As such I've always had the perspective of a "foreigner" / "traveller" or "international". It is one reason why I enjoy living in Prague - it has a very large community of foreigners, you can find people from nearly anywhere here.

How did the project start ?
It started back in 2002 when I discovered VR. Being in Prague, the most beautiful of cities, it didn't take long to realize that a virtual trip through Prague would be pretty damn cool.

VRMAG reported in may 2006 with the article "Cheeky Prague360" about what should become the embryo of a much larger project.

Can u tell us more about the technologies and features of the site ?
The site started out before the age of Google maps. So we had to find our own... We used a flash based zoomify map, and quicktime. I collaborated with the best designer in Prague who I had constructing my personal website.

Eventually this partner exited the picture and my brother David stepped in - professor of computer vision and computer science at Boston College. We started making the site again, adding features and functionality, and importantly, using Google maps. We have in the last couple years made quite a huge and complex web app using the Google maps api - something that wasn't easy, but it works.

click here to visit 360Cities

We are the first VR network to create all of our thousands of panoramas into the new immersive "PhotoOverlay" format which we've made into one huge Google Earth layer which was recently featured in the Google Earth Gallery.

One great function of our sites which you may have overlooked is our "gigapixel" or "bird's eye" view which is present on our Prague and Cesky Krumlov sites.

We have also created a mapplet out of our network which enables you to browse 360cities.net from within maps.google.com.

We have recently launched a blog, VRlog.net which showcases the newest highlights from the network.

Who is involved in the project ?
Jeffrey Martin, David Martin, Andrey Ilyin, Bernhard Vogl, Luca Vascon, Carel Struycken, Pat Swovelin, Willy Kaemena, Sacha Griffin, Paul Palmer, Fat Chai, Walker Young, Kay-Uwe Rosseburg, Andrei Zdetovetchi, Tom Mills, Milko Amorth, Ignacio Rezola, Giancarlo Nicoletti, Thomas Krueger, Markus Matern, Carl von Einem, Koen Verschaeren, Hiroharu Shizuya, Lennart Mollerstrom, Gabor Rev, Alexandre Starovoitov, Stefan Grgic, Bostjan Burger, C B Arun Kumar, Gerardo Antonio Sánchez Torres, Ingemar Bergmark, Nataly Kovarskaya, Alexey Grif, Hans-Dieter Teschner

We are also in talks with a couple "very large" companies but currently I can't make that info public.

Can u tell us more about the business model of 360Cities ?
Put simply, we take the process of publishing VR away from the author, who in most cases would prefer shooting and processing panoramas, than building websites. We publish the VR's in every conceivable form and format. This helps the VR photographer do their job more easily. We want to bring VR closer to people and make it generally more useful.

Future developments ?
One goal - To be in three hundred and sixty cities, what else? ;-)

We are presently (in terms of geographical coverage) the largest VR network in the world. (the largest in terms of numbers of panoramas goes to Don Bain's site and Bostjan Burger's site) - we should surpass those sites in terms of numbers of VR after another couple of months.

We would like to move more into journalism, documentary, and creating opportunities for individuals in the developing world to publicize their projects in things like micro-lending. Also we will very soon move into China.

Links:
Jeffrey Martin's website
Prague360.com
360Cities.net
VRlog.net

Previous article on Jeffrey Martin:
CHEEKY PRAGUE360