360cities.net, a brief history

Here is a screencast that I luckily made in 2007 (I didn't realize how thoroughly impermanent everything on the Web is) showing the second iteration of prague360.com, which eventually morphed into 360cities.net.

This is called the "philopod" technique for shooting a 360 photo, using a string and weight as a reference point in order to minimize parallax. It's possible to use this technique with great precision.

I shot a 360 photo of Vaclav Havel once.

Believe it or not, at one point in time, being featured on this "Yahoo! Picks" page was a really big deal. Yes, I had color television when I was growing up.

This was the homepage of 360 Cities back in 2007. We eventually gave up on the term "Virtual Reality Photography" because no one really knew what it meant.

The page with the world map and tens of thousands of geo-referenced 360 photos on it has always been a very challenging page to make, from both a UX/UI/Design and a software engineering perspective. There is no single best way to show image previews, clusters of markers, or the full size images themselves on one lightweight, simple, easy-to-use page. This map page has gone through many iterations over the years.

The original idea of 360 Cities was that each city of the world would have its own site. That site would contain a map with 360º photos of everything in the city.

The original prague360.com, designed by the great Adam Trachtman, looked very slick, but it was an uneditable Flash Blob. We therefore rewrote it from scratch, once the Google Maps API came into existence in June 2006. A bit of scope creep meant that the originally slick design morphed into a bit of a frankenstein mish mash. Around this time, other panoramic photographers liked this system, and asked if they could do the same in their own cities. Starting with Moscow, Los Angeles, Vienna, Venice, London, Belgrade, and Syria (yes, I know Syria is not a city, but Willy Kaemena had a fantastic collection of panoramas from the whole country!), 360 Cities was born.

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This was in my "just build a crappy prototype, and the product will almost sell itself" phase.

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Back in 2008, there did not exist any kind of multiresolution panorama viewer for the web. However, it was possible to abuse the Google Maps API, and use your own tile pyramid - so we used this to show a gigapixel image.

What the hell is a Mapplet, you ask? You know, it's one of those things that Google deprecated, and not only did no one mourn it, but no one even remembered that they ever existed, after only a few months of them being gone.

Some things in life are totally important, until they're not, and then everyone just forgets about it. It's good to keep this in mind.

As of 2018, 360 Cities is still integrated with the Google Earth client (I mean, the Google Earth software that you download and install on a PC or Mac). It was a great achievement, and a huge validation of our company, back in 2008 when this happened. It was a great source of traffic and prestige, as well as a useful sales tool, to say that anyone in the world could find our images in Google Earth.

For a while I was shooting "VR News" - essentially a 360 photo of whatever interesting event I could find, and publicizing it as much as possible. The idea of "VR" in the year 2006 was a relatively obscure thing. To this day, I do love the idea of using 360º and immersive imaging for journalism; a medium striving for objectivity should be embracing these kinds of technologies as much as possible.

Getting integrated with Google Earth was a big deal. Tech Crunch covering us in 2008 was a huge deal! All of a sudden, people knew who we were! Click here to see the original article.