Never mind about your budget – you can still spend the night in one of Toronto’s top hotels, thanks to Google.
Google is well known for its Street View street level immersive photography, and its global mapping project: it’s heading indoors, too, going inside some of this city’s main tourist attractions.
The lobby of the Shangri-La Hotel in Toronto
Several high-end hotels including the Shangri-La and the Trump International have been ‘mapped’ out: indoor spaces have been photographed by locally hired photographers and digital media producers, then the photos are ‘stitched’ together to create a kind of navigable, immersible virtual environment online.
The Google Street Map project has delivered immersive streetscapes from pretty much any urban space on the planet; what’s more, it has ‘mapped’ out major parks and nature reserves, and it is gone into top galleries and museums around the world, taking pictures and putting virtual tours online. Google has engaged local photographers Jeff Han and John Leung, who together have launched their own photo services company, Virtuo 360.It has been named a ‘Google Trusted Agency’ and it’s working with local and national businesses to help them see the business value of panoramic photography and immersive online experiences.
Using a pro camera and tripod kit, photos of a business setting can be taken fairly quickly; the images are then uploaded to Google’s processing pipeline. Final production and matching and ‘stitching together’ select images takes roughly two hours per tour.
For reasons of privacy, faces of employees and customers are blurred out.
The pair has worked with Rogers Communications, creating virtual tours of its retail stores, and they have worked with Fairview Mall, on behalf of all its retail occupants.
Han and Leung have already completed a tour of Billy Bishop City Airport, aka the Island Airport (certain areas were excluded for security reasons). They say Pearson International Airport is next on their radar.
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submitted by Lee Rickwood
