Flash Panoramas - chance for innovative storytelling

While at the workshop this weekend, I got a peek behind the scenes at Seth Gitner’s latest experimental storytelling technique - flash panoramas.

You can see his first experiment with the Virginia Statehouse panorama at Roanoke.com. This panorama is just a 360-degree photo panorama, but the use of Flash allows for hotspots on the panorama that can be used to embed video, audio, text, and other multimedia elements. Gitner said he’d be exploring those opportunities in the future.

Now, this isn’t the easiest multimedia to create. It requires a special ball head for the camera, an 8-15mm lens (fisheye) and a couple of pieces of software - PTGUI and Flash panorama - in addition to Flash itself, and some time hacking the actionscript.

Still, it is a promising opportunity for new visual storytelling. You can see some examples of Flash panoramas here (mouse over the artwork to see info about each one) and here (move around and find the youtube video). Pretty neat.

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