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SlopeViews aims to take the Immersive Media 360-degree Camera to the marketing industry as a clever way to ‘immerse’ potential customers in their ski-trails and slopes with interactive coordinated maps and video.

Your online viewer will feel like a LOCAL after exploring your resort with OnSnow. SlopeViews produces interactive & engaging content with a message on every trail, lift, and mountain feature. By taking them inside lodges, restaurants, trams, conference space, and hotel amenities, SlopeView’s OnSnow Trail Maps convert prospective online users into confident guests.

You can hit their website to see a demonstration of the system in action.

via SlopeViews OnSnow Beta v.02 – Immersive Ski Trail Map.

Hardware immersive media, onsnow

New York, NY test of MapQuest 360 View. While some images lack clarity, the orange proximity bubbles are useful.

From the MapQuest blog:

360° View provides fantastic panoramic views (360° horizontally and 160° vertically) of any given image within the 360 View coverage area (initially 30 cities and 15 suburbs across the United States with more to come) … Best of all, MapQuest 360 View “just works” without requiring any non-standard 3rd party player downloads.

All Points Blog notes that the source of the imagery is Immersive Media, makers of the Dodeca2360 we’ve discussed before.  Microsoft’s new Bing Maps is pretty impressive with its accuracy and bird’s eye view all over the US, but as James Fee points out, 360° View does not require special installs like Silverlight to work:

Take that Bing Maps and your 3rd party player download.  MapQuest works without any Silverlight player to get in your way… except of course it uses a 3rd party player called Flash.  I suppose this plays into Adobe’s assertion that their 3rd party player download is included by default in many browsers by default.

With Google Maps tripping down the quality scale, while adding 3D cities functionality and increasing the quality of its StreetView, this seems like the logical next step for MapQuest.

Graphics city, geospatial, immersive media, mapquest, maps

David McCutchen is the CTO of Immersive Media, the company behind the recently discussed Dodeca2360.  He took the opportunity to sit down and talk to us (via email) about spherical video, Immersive Media, and the Dodeca2360 in an exclusive VizWorld interview.

VW: How did the idea for Spherical Video come about?

DM: When you think about it, everybody actually lives at the center of a spherical field of view.  If you could capture that image in every direction, in full color, motion and sound, then you could reproduce what a real experience is like.  Lots of people have tried to fake it with virtual reality, but photographic immersive video shows us the real thing.

Click through to read the rest.

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Graphics, Hardware, Science dodeca2360, feature, immersive media, interview, video

Yesterday we told you about the YellowBird spherical camera with it’s unique 6-part lens.  I just found out that ImmersiveMedia has a competing camera called the “Dodeca 2360″, which uses an 11-lens system in a 25-pound package suitable for mounting on a bicycle, backpack, or surfboard.  ImmersiveMedia first came on the scene with Google’s “Street View” which they helped launch back in 2007.

You can see an example of what spherical video looks like in their new campaign for Armani Jeans. Note: it’s a very slow & length load, but a nice interactive spherical video to demonstrate the technology.

Immersive Media / 105.

Hardware 3d, camera, immersive media, video