Tag: 360°

Cosma’s Knowledge Lobby!

~ mehopper

Check out Cosma’s brand new Knowledge Lobby!


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Here’s a quick backstory about it.

I’ve been “making knowledge a place” for a long time, so at this point Cosma features MANY 3D worlds that enable spatial navigation of the Cosma site and other content on the Web.

Recently I’ve been upgrading my old Toy Worlds to somewhat parallel Web Worlds.

For example, here’s the “Walk in Art” Toy World.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

It was cute for what it was, but limited.

Here is the newer, expanded “Walk in Art & Museums” Web World.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

You get the idea.

This Welcome Area is one of the few Toy Worlds that I hadn’t upgraded to a Web World.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

It is essentially a 3D version of Cosma’s 2D Showcase page that has links to sample pages, and it has been the primary interface to Cosma since 2018. It was overdue for an overhaul.

Again, here’s the same new Web World as above for comparison.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Notice that there is a (not very well hidden) trap door that leads to another new Web World.

Next year marks a major milestone in Cosma’s development, so I was playing around with what a real life exhibit about it would look like. Then my simple thought experiment snowballed into this elaborate exercise in visualization.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Of course, every object is a visual link to something on the Web.

What better place to put such a thing than below the new Welcome Area, right?

It serves as an extended, visual “About” page.

So that’s the story behind Cosma’s new “Knowledge Lobby” and the cellar beneath it.

Now the majority of my Toy Worlds have been upgraded to Web Worlds.

Although, there are still a few more to go …

Stay Tuned!

Corn Mazed!

~ mehopper ~ 1 Comment

Step into my latest Web World!

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring.

You can also see it on Kuula.

Backstory

I’ve made a LOT of Web Worlds over the last few years. You can see them here.

They are fun to make and use, but the navigation is fairly simplistic.

However, I know better things are possible.1

Last week I decided to figure out how to make more complex “Myst-like” creations.

The process of learning and practicing the new techniques was a tad tedious.

So, I took a break, and my September is Corny post was the dubious result.

What I failed to mention in the post was just how lost I got in corn mazes.

It was ludicrous — it turned into way more than the tiny break it was supposed to be!

Dr. Mary’s Handy Dandy Guide to Corn Mazes below was the result.

Then along the way I happened to Google “How to Make a Corn Maze.”

I REALLY got lost in that, and then, lo and behold, it hit me.

Making a corn maze would be an excellent way to practice my newly minted technical skills!

Voilà, my new Corn Maze above was the result.

As for how long it will take you to explore it, no worries.

It is tiny — it isn’t even the size of a city block.

It will probably only take you a few minutes to finish.

Only time will tell how much larger my future Web Worlds will get, though 😉

I have made some fairly extensive “Knowledge Places” in the past (e.g. Knowledge Paradise).

Enjoy!

Dr. Mary’s Handy Dandy Guide to Corn Mazes

Encyclopedia

Corn Maze (Wikipedia)

Inspiration

Life Lessons in a Corn Maze (Kelsey Luing, Boston.com)

Guide

Pro Tips: How Not to Get Lost in a Corn Maze (Kelsey Luing, Boston.com)

Here some links to help you find a corn maze near you.

Corn Mazes in Massachusetts (Boston Central)
Which corn maze is the best? Vote now! (USA Today)

Science

7 Incredible NASA Corn Mazes: Cool Crop Circles for Science (Nancy Atkinson, Universe Today)

Commerce

Corn Maze a Cash Crop For Farmers (The Weather Channel)

Product

Corn Maze (Etsy)

History

Inside the Weird World of Corn Mazes (Roxanne Hoorn, Atlas Obscura)

Library

Corn Maze (Library Thing)

Corn Maze (WorldCat)

Education

Ten Lessons for Teaching Geography Using Corn Mazes (U.S. Geological Survey)
Design a Corn Maze (Where The Teaching Things Are)

Occupation

Farmers Turn to Professionals to Cut Corn Mazes (NJ.com, YouTube Video)

News

Corn Mazes (JSTOR)
Corn Mazes (NPR Archives)

Competition

Best Corn Maze (USA 10 Best)

Game

Corn Maze Games (The Corn Maze Guy)

Poem

OEDILF: The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form

1.   The owl and the end of the maze is my homage to the mascot of the 3D MIT’s Athena/Muse software and associated applications which I studied during my doctoral research and also worked on as an MIT employee in the 1990s.

September is Corny!

~ mehopper

Have you ever noticed that most months tend to be associated with certain adjectives.

October is spooky, December is festive, and so on …

I think of September as corny!

One obvious reason for this is because it’s when corn is harvested and readily available.

Another reason is because September is usually the month of the Corn Moon — this year it’s September 7th (this Sunday).

Here’s a story about it.

Full Corn Moon & Harvest Moon in September (Anne Buckle & Vigdis Hocken, Time & Date)

This Corn Moon is special because it is going to coincide with a lunar eclipse (Blood Moon).

Here is a video and a link to a story about the phenomena.

Moon Phase (YouTube Channel)

The Full ‘Corn Moon’ Rises This Week — Bringing a ‘Blood Moon’ Lunar Eclipse to Most of the World (Jamie Carter, Live Science)

It isn’t going to be visible in the US, but some of you are in places where it will be a sight to see.

September is also when I tend to notice stories about corn mazes popping up in the news.

Here’s one recent example from my local news.

Mass Appeal: Ward’s Berry Farm Sunflower Maze (Polikseni Manxhari & Amaka Ubaka, 7 News Boston)

Here’s a brief 360° video by Bryan Ensign that will give you a sense of what it is like to visit one.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Bryan Ensign (YouTube Channel)

Here some links to help you find a corn maze near you.

Corn Mazes in Massachusetts (Boston Central)
Which corn maze is the best? Vote now! (USA Today)

If all this talk about corn made you crave some, here’s a link to plenty of “corny” recipes.

43 Corn Recipes You’ll Make All Summer Long (Food Network Kitchen)

Finally, here is a link that’s somewhat obligatory at this point.

35 September Jokes To Remember (Carissa Soh, Little Day Out)

So you see, September is corny … or maybe it’s just me that is 😉

Have a great September!

Find out more about the Calendar …

Beach Bum’s Magic Game Room

~ mehopper

‘Tis the season for games!

At least it is for me, because I update my “fun” pages every year around this time.

Of course, the game page is the most fun to do.

While I was doing research for upgrading the history section of the page, I stumbled upon this awesome article published in 1972 that has a ton of neat history about the game Spacewar and a lot of other “computing” related things as well.

Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums (Stewart Brand, Rolling Stone)

I loved the word “bum” in the title of the article so much, I decided to use it in the title of this new “Web World” that I made to showcase some neat interactive “game” related experiences.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring

If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.

Enjoy!

Find out more about the games …

Hike, Wander & Walk-in the Web!

~ mehopper

Welcome to Web Worlds@Cosma!

The pages of Cosma have links to many thousands of the best resources on the Web.

Immersive 3D and 360° experiences are among the most valuable types of resources, and so there are links to thousands of them distributed across the hundreds of pages on the Web site.

The Web Worlds@Cosma are thematic 360° images with visual links to a sample of ten to twenty of the best Immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the Web for a specific subject.

There are many Web Worlds distributed across the pages on the Cosma Web site.

The Web World below is a special one with links to many of the others.

There are hundreds of immersive 3D and 360° experiences to explore!

Click on objects to see 3D and 360° experiences, and click doorways to go to other Web Worlds.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

If you’ve been following Cosma, then you know that Web Worlds have been evolving over the course of the last year. Continue reading below to learn the story behind them.

———————–
New Worlds, Old Ways@MEHopper

The story of Web Worlds began while I was updating my MEHopper Web site last summer.

I had been playing around with virtual home staging software and noticed that some of the spaces looked as if they were generated in the virtual world SecondLife. It was neat to see that “nearly” photorealistic 360° images could be generated and exported from that system.

I’ve used SecondLife to create Knowledge Places for decades, and I knew that it was now possible to take and download 360° photos, but I hadn’t gotten around to trying it yet.

I finally got inspired to do it and started with (re)creating my MEHopper Gallery Toy World. Toy Worlds are dioramas created with dollhouse furniture and other miniature objects that are photographed with a RICOH THETA S 360° Camera. The resulting 360° photos are posted on Kuula to overlay links to the Web.

Sure enough, I was able to take a 360° picture in SecondLife and upload it to Kuula to add links in the same way that I had for the Toy World. The result was this new MEHopper Gallery.

Click on the pictures to read posts about when and where they were taken.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
Web Worlds@New Media Museum

The experiment was successful enough that I decided to try my hand at another one.

This time it was for a space for my New Media Museum Web site. I had experimented with making virtual museums using my own museum’s content, but this time the goal was to create an interface to other computer museums.

This goal also inspired me to resurect my idea of “Magic Doors” from my work in SecondLife. You can read about the history of them on the Knowledge Objects page.

M.E.Hopper's Magic Window in SecondLife 2006
M.E.Hopper's Magic Window Farm in SecondLife 2006

The result of this experiment was the Computer Museums Lobby below, and you can read the story about why this came about in this post on my New Media Museum Web site.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, objects to learn about them, “i”s to learn about the museums, and doors to enter the virtual museums.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

It was around this time that it dawned on me that Web Worlds was a good term for describing the 3D interfaces that I was creating in SecondLife and Kuula to make visual links to other immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the Web. I did some research and found that the term had been used to describe virtual worlds on the Web before, and so I decided that it was the right term to use for what I was doing.

———————–
Web Worlds@Cosma

It wasn’t long after the term Web Worlds stuck that I decided Cosma needed some of them.

One major goal of Cosma is to have 3D interfaces for spatial Knowledge Navigation of the resources on Cosma and other Web sites. The history of this work is on the Worlds page.

There are currently a series of Toy Worlds that serve as 360° visual interfaces for the major content areas of Cosma. There is also a Cosma Welcome Area Toy World on the front page of Cosma that has links to the others.

However, there are some content areas that don’t have Toy Worlds. That’s because I never got around to making them, and this has bugged me for awhile. Web Worlds struck me as a way to remedy the situation.

The idea of “Magic Doors” as links to other immersive 3D and 360° experiences came in handy, too. I’ve been adding links to immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the pages of Cosma for about five years, and there are thousands of them distributed across the Web site. Unfortunately, few people notice them because the links to amazing experiences blend in with more mundane links (Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Open Courseware, JSTOR etc.). I decided that Web Worlds with visual links could be a way to bring more attention the links to immersive 3D and 360° experiences.

I happened to be updating the Transportation pages, and it was one of the content areas with no Toy World. I also happened to have tons of cool objects in SecondLife to use for the job (Cars, Trains, Boats, Planes etc.). It wasn’t long before Transit Paradise was born.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

One limitation of my approach to making Web Worlds reared it’s ugly head, though.

You can only cram so many doors and objects into a single 360° photo.

This result was that there wasn’t enough room for all of the Transportation content, and I decided that Space Transportation needed to go into a separate Web World.

I was also updating the Space pages at the time and decided to address another weakness. While the existing Solar Extremes Toy World was a fine interface for the Solar System pages, there were some pages related to Astronomy that weren’t included in it.

Ultimately Space Transportation and Astronomy were combined into Space Depot.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

Soon after that I was working on the Library page and saw experiences there begging for attention. The Great Libraries Antechamber resulted, and the post Little, Big, Old, Spooky Libraries explains more about it.

———————–
Hike the Web!

November 17th is National Take a Hike Day, and I planned a post to highlight some virtual hikes on the Web. A Web World with doors to those and some parks seemed like a nice idea, and so Hiking Trails Hall came into being.

I was also updating the pages in the Nature section of Cosma around that time, and I thought it would be good to make Web Worlds to emphasize the links to experiences quietly lurking about on those pages.

For example, there were links to 3D tours of Natural History Museums on the Dinosaur page, and so a Web World for accessing Natural History Museums seemed like a “should do.”

The Plant, Flower and Tree pages had links to some lovely Botanical Gardens, so Botanical Gardens Orangery was an obvious choice for another Web World.

There were many links to fun experiences on the Animal pages that needed attention. I also happened to already have some very cute animals in my inventory in SecondLife, so Critter’s Hollow was a no-brainer.

Finally, I created this Nature Center to integrate and access the four separate Web Worlds and introduced it in the Hike the Web post.

Touch doors and objects to enter 360° virtual experiences, touch “i”s to learn more, and touch arrows to go to other areas of the Nature Center.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
Beach Bum Break

Then came January, in New England, and this year was worse than usual! 🙁

I’m a hopeless “beach person.” That’s why there’s even a Beach page on Cosma.

I couldn’t go visit beaches with warm weather, so making Enchanted Beach Hut, Enchanted Beach Shack and the Enchanted Beach House below were therapy. You can read about it in My Enchanted Beach Houses post.

Touch doorways to visit 360° experiences, and touch posters and objects to find out more.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

It turned out that my beach adventures weren’t just therapy — they also inspire the design of the largest Web Worlds creation so far …

———————–
Wander the Web@Wanderlust!

Later in January I got busy slogging through updating and expanding the “World” pages (Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, Antarctica and their many children).

Years ago I made an arm-chair Travel Lounge Toy World. It was okay, but it didn’t showcase many immersive experiences.

In fact, there were so many links to fantastic experiences on the pages that I was updating, a single Web World wasn’t going to be enough. There ended up being six Web Worlds (Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania and Antarctica).

Notice that I loved my Enchanted Beach House so much, I repurposed it for all of them. Then, as with the Nature Center, I made a central Web World to access the others. Voila! The result was Wanderlust Travel Villa!

Touch doorways to visit 360° experiences, and touch posters to find out more.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
Walk-in-Web

Earlier in February, after the extravaganza that was Wanderlust, I wasn’t sure that I would be up to making more Web Worlds any time soon. Then I was updating the Arts & Entertainment pages and realized a few things.

First, I don’t spend nearly enough time on them, and I don’t add that content to the other pages as much as I should either. I need to fix that.

Second, my earlier Walk-in-Art Toy World was kind of pathetic, and it didn’t have links to great art museums that you can visit on the Web.

Of course, that just wouldn’t do at all, so welcome to Walk-in-Art & Museums.

Touch the art and doorways to visit 360° experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
One World to Rule Them All

After reading the story above, I hope you can see why I needed to make a single Web World to access the others. It became too unwieldy to find all of the Web Worlds distributed across the Cosma Web site, and old fashioned text links to them would be too boring and not in the spirit of why I made them.

I hope you enjoy using Web Worlds@Cosma to Hike, Wander and Walk-in the hundreds of 3D and 360° experiences that you can find through Cosma Web Worlds Welcome Area!

Enjoy!
— M. E. Hopper

Hike the Web

~ mehopper

Sunday, November 17th is National Hiking Day, and it’s one of my favorite “made up” holidays!

Here’s an inspirational video about it that includes a bit of nice history.

On This Day (YouTube Channel)
On This Day (Official Website)

Celebrating is easy — just take a hike, or a walk, if that’s more your speed.

The U.S. National Park Service maintains this handy map to help you find a place near you.

Find a Park Map (U.S. National Park Service)

Now, perhaps you are someone who needs a bit more inspiration than watching a video and clicking a link to find a park, or maybe you’re not in a position to take a hike or walk at all.

In that case, perhaps a “virtual” hike might help you celebrate. There are actually a surprising number of ways to take those on the Web.

For example, the U.S. National Park Service maintains a page for that, too.

Find Your “Virtual” Park (US National Park Service)

In addition, many of the parks’ websites have “Photos and Multimedia” pages that include “virtual” experiences. Here is an example from the Grand Canyon.

Grand Canyon Virtual Tours (US National Park Service)

There are also many 360° videos on YouTube that provide virtual visits to National Parks.

For example, Air Pano has made quite a few of them. Here are links to pages on their website for three of them. Their home page has a map where you can find more.

Grand Canyon National Park
Yellowstone National Park
Bryce Canyon National Park

Here’s another YouTube Channel with a long playlist of great videos.

National Parks Virtual Tours — 360° Immersive Travel Experiences (Odyssey Visual Media)

Of course, Google doesn’t just make it so that you can immerse yourself in YouTube videos — they are also behind Google Earth. Here’s their “virtual visit” to the Grand Canyon.

Grand Canyon (Google Earth)

There are also some neat custom made “virtual” experiences. Virtual Yosemite is an example. There is also a Virtual Yosemite Directory.

Finally, writing this post inspired me to create this 360° experience called Hiking Trails Hall.

Click the “doors” to enter 360° virtual parks and “i”s for information about them.

If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.

All of this nudged me to update the “nature” pages on Cosma. One thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, I was inspired to create this entire Nature Center with three other spaces to explore in addition to Hiking Trails Hall. Again, click “doors” to enter 360° experiences, “i”s for information about them, and arrows to go to other areas of the Nature Center. Some objects also link to fun 360° experiences.

If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.

Enjoy & Happy Hiking!

Learn more about nature …

Space Cadet Academy

~ mehopper

Confession — I’m a major space cadet! I mean this in an older, positive sense of the word, which is that I’m a “space enthusiast.”

That’s why I really get into updating the pages on Cosma having to do with space.

Things got a little out of hand this time, though.

I began just like I always do, updating the Mars page, because that’s my favorite one.

Poking around YouTube, looking for new ideas, turned up this 360° video taken by NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover. It is a video with a 2.4 billion-pixel panorama of the Van Zyl Overlook.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (YouTube Channel)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Official Website)

Better yet, there’s an interactive version online that’s even more impressive.

I also found an entire YouTube Playlist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with more than twenty 360° panorama videos of Mars.

Let’s just say all of that exploring Mars took …   a few minutes.

Then I came across this YouTube video about something called Eyes on the Solar System from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that renders scientifically accurate views of the planets and spacecraft from their missions.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (YouTube Channel)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Official Website)

That video had me at space buff, arm-chair astronaut and 3D, but it was outdated.

It turns out that there is no need to download anything anymore — there’s a newer version of Eyes on the Solar System that is entirely online.

I scrounged around YouTube and found this longer video about a more recent version of Eyes on the Solar System. This video explains that it is actually part of a larger suite of apps called NASA’s Eyes that includes Eyes on Asteroids, Eyes on Earth, Eyes on Exoplanets and Mars 2020.

NASA Scientific Visualization Studio (YouTube Channel)
NASA Scientific Visualization Studio (Official Website)

Okay, neat! Watching that video, and then playing around with all of it (particuarly the Mars area of Eyes on the Solar System and Mars 2020) didn’t take “much” time at all 😉

I was only a “little” behind schedule.

Then I just had to spend a “little more time” playing around with cool things from NASA/JPL (Experience Insight, Experience Curiosity and Explore with Curiosity). There’s more about them and links to them on Cosma’s Mars page along with some other fun stuff.

One problem. I spent all that time on the Mars page, but I hadn’t even touched all of those other pages about space.

Time to get back to work …

… but it wasn’t long before things went awry.

I came across a NASA website called Solar System Treks. It allows you to visualize, explore, and analyze the surfaces of other planets, moons and astroids using real data. You can view the worlds through the eyes of many different instruments, pilot real-time 3D flyovers above mountains and into craters. Here’s a video about it.

NASA Scientific Visualization Studio (YouTube Channel)
NASA Scientific Visualization Studio (Official Website)

The web site opens with a tutorial that takes a few minutes to do, but it is worth it. Of course, I just had to play with that to make sure it worked, right?

So now this was well past when I thought I would have been long done with updating the space related pages on Cosma, but I did eventually get all the way to updating the top Universe page.

While doing research for that, I tripped over the Hubble Skymap (NASA), WorldWide Telescope (American Astronomical Society), and ViewSpace: Discover the Universe Interactives (Space Telescope Science Institute).

Oh noooo …

All in all, updating the space pages ended up taking ten times longer than I had planned.

So there you have it. I spent the better part of this last week being a real space cadet!

The good news is that I put descriptions and links to all the fun stuff that I found on the pages as I updated them, so you can find them and spend a time becoming a space cadet, too.

You can use the Web World called Space Depot and the Toy World below it called Solar Exremes to get started exploring the updated pages as well as a few other fun experiences.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

You can also view this Toy World on Kuula.

You can also choose your own adventure by clicking on the links below.

Happy Space Cadeting!

“Space”
Universe (Astronomical Instrument)
Galaxy Milky Way, Andromeda
Planetary System Star, Brown Dwarf, Planet, Moon

Our Neighborhood
Solar System Sun
Terrestrial Planet Mercury, Venus, Earth (Moon), Mars
Asteroid Belt Ceres, Vesta
Jovian Planet Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune
Trans-Neptunian Object
Kuiper Belt Pluto, Haumea, Makemake
Scattered Disc Eris, Sedna, Planet X
Oort Cloud Etc. Scholz’s Star
Small Body Comet, Centaur, Asteroid

p.s. I confess that I can be a space cadet in the other sense of the word too. I accidentally “re-posted” TRAPPIST-1 a few days ago. If you subscribe to the Cosma blog, then you probably saw it in your email. However, I have trouble feeling bad about it, because the post is an oldie, but goodie. There’s a companion post called Exoplanet Junket still worth a gander.

Beachy Adventures

~ mehopper

Hello, it’s been awhile.

You may have noticed that there haven’t been as many posts on Cosma as there used to be. There are a few reasons for this, but a big one is that, with an old project like Cosma, the focus on different parts of it must shift over time.

Last year’s focus began with cleaning up and expanding the content on the pages. The previous formatting wasn’t great, and there were quite a lot of broken links. They were pretty mangy, and it was time to deal with it.

Then the abrupt discontinuation of the 360° image hosting service called RoundMe required an additional focus on recoding and posting all of the Toy Worlds. You can see all of the re-posted Toy Worlds on Kuula.

Here is the main entry to the new version of Toy Worlds. Click on objects to find out about them. Use the menu or doors to visit other Toy Worlds.

While all of that was going on, the posts (which I call Adventures), a major priority for so long, fell by the wayside. Once upon a time there were over 200 of them that had been accumulating since 2016 when Cosma moved to WordPress after Wikispaces shut down (there were hundreds more posts there that were written over ten years and have never been re-posted here). Many posts on this site were outdated, and a lot of the YouTube videos were broken. I decided that it would be better to hide them until I had time to currate and repost them.

So, the time to focus on posts has arrived. Watch for many old and new “Adventures” to (re)appear in the semi-near-future.

I decided to start with (re)posting some “Beachy Things.” This isn’t because they’re all that central to the content of Cosma. They are not.

It’s just because whenever I start to work on something for Cosma, I tend to start with things that relate to my personal art and adventures, and those tend to be focused on beachy things. I attribute this to the undue influence of my pesky Hopper genes.

It is no coincidence that there are pages about beaches, lighthouses and sandcastles.

One of my first Toy Worlds was also a silly little beach scene. Here it is.

I first introduced that in this post called, not surprisingly, The Beach.

Here are other “beachy” posts that I spiffed up.

Beach Gazes
Gone Beaching!
Catch Some Waves!
Sand Art

I hope you have enjoyed this beachy break. If it has inspired you to visit a beach, either virtually or in real life, then check out CNN’s A Year of the World’s Best Beaches and Dr. Beach to find more sea, sand and sun.

Happy Beaching!

Polar Party Toy World

~ mehopper

About five years ago I created a series of what I called Toy Worlds to be 3D interfaces to Cosma.

You can see all of my Toy Worlds on my page on the Kuula service that I use to post them.

That was a phase that I thought was over   —   I moved on to exploring other technologies for making 3D websites (more about that in the spring). However, I got nostalgic for Toy Worlds while I was pulling out holiday decorations this year, so here is a brand new Toy World.

Click and drag to look around and click on objects to learn more about them.

Enjoy & Happy Holidays!
Mary

Easter Tidings & Tidbits

~ mehopper

I’ve been immersed in working on updating Cosma pages about technical subjects like computers and the internet lately.

Make that TOO immersed, I needed a break.

Given it’s Easter weekend, make that a bunny break!

First, I dug up my old Bunny Fix post from 2020. That was fun, but those bunny clips were only a few minutes long. I wanted more, so I headed to YouTube in search of some more bunnies.

However, I didn’t find any because I got distracted by a video about Easter traditions.

The Adventure Buddies (YouTube Channel)

Some of the traditions were fun and familiar, but others not-so-much. The Scandinavian Witches, Czech Switches and Cold Water in Hungary weren’t so enviable.

Of course, that cute Australian Easter Bilby caught my eye. I set off on a YouTube safari in search of them. Here’s one of the better videos I found.

Behind the News (YouTube Channel)
Behind the News (Official Website)

Those bunnies and foreign traditions were fun distractions, but my favorite Easter thing to do remains coloring Easter eggs. That is why I was a sucker for this video about ways to dye them. It is a bit long, but each time you think the ideas won’t get any more creative, they do.

Cleverly (YouTube Channel)
Cleverly (Official Website)

Finally, one last fun traditional distraction is the Easter Egg hunt.

In case you can’t do a real one, here’s a 360° video with a quick virtual version.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

ABC11-WTVD (YouTube Channel)
ABC11-WTVD (Official Website)

There you have it. That’s the end of my break — I hope you enjoyed coming along for my unexpectedly meandering (de)tour through Easter tidbits =:)

Find out more about bunnies and celebrations in general …

Bunny Fix!

~ mehopper

Easter is here, and it’s time for a bunny fix!

I decided to go rummage around YouTube for some bunnies.

My quest began with searching for a random cute bunny that I could just watch for a awhile. Instead, I found a 360° video about the Japanese island Okunoshima.

Jackpot!

This video from NowThis explains why Okunoshima’s nickname is “Rabbit Island.”

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Now This News (YouTube Channel)
Now This News (Official Website)

In addition, the site Gateway to Rabbit Island was basically a virtual vacation.

Next up I found a video entitled INVASION! from Baobab Studios narrated by Ethan Hawke and is a bit out of this world.

Note, as is usually the case with 360° YouTube videos, it makes sense if you watch it in the regular way, but it’s more fun if you interact with it and look around.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Baobab Studios (YouTube Channel)
Baobab Studios (Official Website)

After all of that, I was starting to feel better, but I still didn’t quite feel like I had gotten the “Easter bunny” vibe that I was looking for, yet.

Onward!

Happily, the next thing that I stumbled upon was exactly the medicine that I needed.

You’ve heard of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, right?

Well, it turns out that there’s a rendition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, narrated by none other than Dame Judi Dench, posted on the Beatrix Potter YouTube Channel. Better yet, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny and many others are posted there too.

Beatrix Potter (YouTube Channel)

Now that’s the kind of bunny fix that I needed, and I hope you enjoyed it too =:-)

Find out more about bunnies …

Moon’scapes

~ mehopper

There’s no denying that it’s been a rough week for many Earthlings.

On the other hand, it’s been a great week for anyone who spends their time more preoccupied with the Moon than with more earthly concerns.

That’s because there’s a treasure trove of news about our lunar realm.

For example, NASA’s Goddard Media Studios released this stunning 4K video that used data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to generate a visualization of what the Apollo 13 astronauts would have seen between the time that they came around from the dark side of the Moon and when they reestablished radio contact with Mission Control.

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
NASA Goddard (Official Website)

If you have ever seen the movie Apollo 13, then you appreciate why this particular time frame was so poignant. If you have never seen it, then I highly recommend that you do!

Of course, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is no longer our only source of imagery from the far side of the Moon because China landed their Chang’e-4 spacecraft and Yutu-2 rover there last year, and they’re still there working away. The Chang’e-4’s mission team celebrated the anniversary of their success by releasing some data and images to the public.

You can find out more about Chang’e-4’s moonscapes in this article.

The Most Detailed Photos Yet of the Far Side of the Moon (Neel V. Patel, Technology Review)

In addition, hot off the press, the Yutu-2 rover’s radar scanned up to 40 meters below the surface of the Moon, and those findings were just published this week as well.

China’s Moon Rover Takes a Deeper Look at the Far Side (Jonathan O’Callaghan, Scientific American)
Digging into the Far Side of the Moon: Chang’E-4 Probes 40 Meters into Lunar Surface (Chinese Academy of Sciences Headquarters, AAAS EurekAlert)
The Moon’s Farside Shallow Subsurface Structure Unveiled by Chang’E-4 Lunar Penetrating Radar (Chunlai Li, et al. Science Advances)

So, what a great week for Moon lovers!

Finally, it’s Friday, so a bit of fun is in order — check out this 360° video that shows a “different” way of seeing a (fictional) moonscape.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

VR 360 TV (YouTube Channel)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief stint as a “Moonling.”

If you want more Moon’scapes, then head on over to NASA and Google.

If you want to learn more about space and space travel, explore Space Depot!

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.

You can also see it directly on Kuula.

Happy Friday, Stay Healthy & Have a Great Leap Day!

Find out more about the Moon@Cosma …

Penguin Playtime

~ mehopper

Brrr, baby, it’s cold outside!

Let’s embrace it, even celebrate it, by watching some penguins play for a few minutes!

Here’s a 360° video of magellanic penguins sledding, right up until and after they knock the camera over and have a good laugh.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Wildlife Protection Solutions (YouTube Channel)
Wildlife Protection Solutions (Facebook)

Okay, truth be known, they were probably making all of that noise for another reason 😉

Here’s a 360° video of rockhopper penguins frolicking in a tidal pool until they start doing close-up cameos for the camera.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Wildlife Protection Solutions (YouTube Channel)
Wildlife Protection Solutions (Facebook)

Finally, this 360° video introduces you to a vast party of king penguins and their woolly chicks carousing on a beach in Gold Harbour in South Georgia. It’s interesting enough to watch as a regular video, but it’s more fun to watch if you look around, and it’s really adorable if you look down — be sure to do that!

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Adam Cropp (YouTube Channel)
Adam Cropp (Official Website)

What is it about penguins that make them so darn cute?

I’m not sure, but whatever it is, it inspired me to make a brand new page about Penguins@Cosma!

Happy Weekend!

Touch the Sun

~ mehopper

Remember how Icarus wanted to touch the Sun, but met his demise instead?

Well, scientists at NASA wanted to touch the Sun too, but unlike Icarus, they succeeded!

Better yet, they are beginning to share what they learned by doing it!

Before we get into all of that, let’s go back and start at the beginning.

NASA launched a robotic spacecraft called the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) in 2018, and this video describes the probe’s audacious mission to “touch the Sun.”

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
NASA Goddard (Official Website)

Then NASA posted this 360° video about the probe’s launch that was narrated by Nicola Fox (Project Scientist at that time and now Director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division).

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

NASA (YouTube Channel)
NASA (Official Website)

Since its launch, the probe has done a spectacular job of starting to achieve its scientific goals, and some of the first results were just released this week.

Here’s a quick teaser that NASA posted ahead of a press conference on Wednesday.

ScienceAtNASA (YouTube Channel)
NASA Science (Official Website)

This video summarizes the key discoveries that NASA shared at the press conference.

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
NASA Goddard (Official Website)

Four articles about the results were also posted by the journal Nature ahead of their publication in the print edition on December 12th. This article introduces those articles and has links to them.

A Step Closer to the Sun’s Secrets (Daniel Verscharen, Nature)

It’s awesome to know more about what makes that great glowing ball in the sky tick, but I also found myself a bit sad because the mission’s goals do not include sending back imagery for us Earthlings to enjoy. That means we still don’t know what it looks like to “touch the Sun.”

Perhaps it would look a bit like this 360° video of a simulation of the Sun that was posted by a hearty YouTuber way back in 2016.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Zproxy (YouTube Channel)

That was cathartic to watch, but of course it wouldn’t sound like that because there is no “sound” in space. The actual experience would also be way, way more visually stunning.

We can be certain of that because, while the Parker Solar Probe doesn’t capture imagery, there’s another NASA mission called the Solar Dynamics Observatory that does. It doesn’t capture 360° videos, but what it does capture is far more dynamic than the simulation.

Here’s a video that the Solar Dynamics Observatory captured on June 18, 2015. This isn’t exactly how it would look because it’s been colorized in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths, but it still gives you a sense of the unbelievable majesty of the activity that you would see on the surface of our favorite star if you were able to go there in person.

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
NASA Goddard (Official Website)

How beautiful was that?!?!

Kudos to the scientists and engineers at NASA for having the audacity to find ways to go where no one has gone before and for communicating to us what it’s like there, too!

If you want to learn more about the the rest of the Solar System, explore this Toy World!

Click the 360° image below to explore it, click the menu in the upper right for controls and click “i” buttons on/off for links to experiences. Use “portals” to visit otherToy Worlds.

You can also explore this Toy World on Kuula.

You can also choose your own adventure by clicking on the links below.

“Space”
Universe (Astronomical Instrument)
Galaxy Milky Way, Andromeda
Planetary System Star, Brown Dwarf, Planet, Moon

Our Neighborhood
Solar System Sun
Terrestrial Planet Mercury, Venus, Earth (Moon), Mars
Asteroid Belt Ceres, Vesta
Jovian Planet Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune
Trans-Neptunian Object
Kuiper Belt Pluto, Haumea, Makemake
Scattered Disc Eris, Sedna, Planet X
Oort Cloud Etc. Scholz’s Star
Small Body Comet, Centaur, Asteroid

Find out more about the Sun@Cosma …

Sand Art

~ mehopper

The last few weeks have been an odd mix of work and play for me.

On the one hand, I’ve been hard at work on a project that I’ll share here in the near future.

On the other hand, I’ve also been somewhat obsessed with sand sculptures.

This is because one of my favorite ways to take a break is to go for a walk on my nearest beach, and that happens to be a place called Revere Beach.

Here are some links to where you can find out about why Revere Beach is special.
How Revere Beach Became America’s First Public Beach (Edgar B. Herwick III, WGBH)
Boston’s Revere Beach: The Complete Guide (Kathryn Cirrone, Trip Savvy)

The beach is actually fairly deserted most of the time — there’s often just myself and a handful of other “beach people” walking or just soaking up some sun.

Here’s a 360° picture that I took which shows what it usually looks like there.

However, things got a lot busier the second half of July because the annual Revere Beach International Sand Sculpting Festival ran from July 26th to July 28th, but the setup and sand delivery actually started happening a week before.

Of course, it’s fun to watch the festivities, and it’s almost impossible to refrain from taking snapshots when something like this happens on your home turf.

Here’s a short slide show of some shots that I took of the festival.

Here are my pictures of my favorite sculptures. Click the gallery for a slide show.

Normally I would have stopped there, but then I got an idea for a project stuck in my head that then took on a life of its own.

You see, as much as I love watching the festival unfold, it also strikes me as bittersweet. It is at the height of summer when preparations start in mid-July, but then the sculptures stay on display for weeks and slowly melt until bulldozers come and wipe them away in mid-August.

To me, the sculptures serve as sort of a metaphor for the short, sweet existence of summer. When they are being built and displayed, summer is in its full glory. Then the crowds leave, the sculptures deteriorate, and by the time they are gone, summer is almost gone too. Schools are starting, Halloween decorations are in stores, and the only thing anyone talks about is Fall.

So, I became obsessed with instantiating this perspective in time-lapses of the sculptures.

For example, here’s a slideshow with photos that I took to create a time-lapse of this year’s Center Sculpture showing its full life cycle from before it was born until it’s demise.


 
Here are time-lapses of just some of my other favorite sculptures.

 
There are some more time-lapse videos like these on a longer version of this post that I did for my personal blog From Sand to Sand.

Now, if you’re like me, you think of all of this as being about sandcastles, even though there were no “real” sandcastles this year — the closest thing was the sculpture of Notre Dame.

I admit to being just a tad disappointed that no one decided to build a sandcastle of some sort, even though it probably would have been judged as trite if they did.

That’s why I felt a bit of joy when further down the beach I saw a gentleman building a small, honest-to-goodness sandcastle.

It turns out that he was doing it to promote a cute little product called Create A Castle. Here’s a video about their kit, and there a number of others on their YouTube Channel.

TTPM Toy Reviews (YouTube Channel)
TTPM Toy Reviews (Official Website)

While I was poking around for information about Create a Castle and other related resources for this project, it really dawned on me that building things with sand, or sand art and play as Wikipedia calls it, has evolved from a child’s activity into an industry.

For example, a gentleman named Andy Hancock offers Sandcastle Building Lessons on South Padre Island in Texas. He has posted a whole YouTube Playlist.

Then, of course, Revere Beach isn’t the only place that hosts sand festivals and competitions — there are a ton of them around the country and the world.

The 10 Best Sandcastle Competitions in America (Kim Windyka Kim Windyka, Fodors)

Fun stuff!

Now that I’ve gotten documenting and sharing the demise of sand structures, I need to get back to work on that project that I’m preparing to release soon.

That doesn’t mean that I won’t be taking a few breaks to visit the beach, though.

Here’s the thing. Summer doesn’t officially end until the Autumnal Equinox on September 23rd. It may be on the wane, but there are still weeks left. Don’t let it go before its time. There is still plenty of time to enjoy some good old traditional warm weather activities like cookouts and visits to the beach.

I intend to do that, and I hope you will too 🙂

Happy Summer, Still!

Find out more about Sandcastles and Beaches …

Catch Some Waves!

~ mehopper

Want a quick mini-vacation? Check out this 360° video of tuberiding.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Waveor Company (YouTube Channel)
Waveor Company (Official Website)

It’s beautiful, but as you looked around, did you notice that there’s no surfer in the video?

I didn’t realize, at first, that it’s a promo for a game called Virtual Surfing. So, while it’s awesome that it’s so realistic, it’s not real.

On the other hand, there are a couple of fun 360° videos of real tuberiding on YouTube.

Here’s one with Ollie O’ Flaherty tuberiding off of Ireland’s Cliffs of Moher.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Wild Atlantic Way, Discover Ireland (YouTube Channel)
Wild Atlantic Way, Discover Ireland (Official Website)

If you are a surfer and want to do this yourself, then here’s an article where surfing pros share their favorite places to go tuberiding.

The Best Tubes on Earth According to Experts (Ashel Pierson, Surfline)

If you’re not a surfer, but would like to be one, then here are some helpful links to get you started catching waves …

Surfology: How to walk on water in 7 easy steps (Surfline)
Surfology: Surf School Directory (Surfline)
Surf Schools: A Guide to Learn How to Surf (Surfer Today)
Top 10 Surf Schools (National Geographic)
10 of the best surfing schools in the world (Jennifer Hudson, The Guardian)

Hang ten!

If you enjoy adventures with a side of adrenaline then check out these other posts …

Heights!
Up, Up and Away!
Wingsuit Rush!
Go for a Fly!
NYC Highs
Extreme Biking, Artfully!
Zip the World!

Find out more about sports and adventure …

St. Paddy’s Day Jaunt

~ mehopper

Yeah, it’s finally time to see some green around here — the official start of Spring is next week, and today is St. Patrick’s Day!

Brace yourself — you’re getting a whirlwind virtual visit to Dublin for St. Paddy’s Day!

We’ll start the excursion off with a quick 360° tour of some well known places in Dublin.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

360 Video Ireland (YouTube Channel)

It’s early, so for the art lovers, we’ll take a quick trip over for a three minute 360° tour of the National Gallery of Ireland.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

The Journal (YouTube Channel)
The Journal (Official Website)

It’s still early, and there’s a place called Knockdrin Castle that might still be for sale. I’m pretty sure we can’t afford it, but it will be a hoot to take a quick 360° tour. We do have those lovely lottery tickets for sale in the US, so you never know 🙂

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Bloomberg Originals (YouTube Channel)
Bloomberg Originals (Official Website)

Knockdrin Castle is on Sale for the First Time in Half a Century (James Tarmy, Bloomberg)
Knockdrin Castle (Wikipedia)

Okay, the festivities will be starting, so it’s time to get back to Dublin and take in the parade. Thanks to SEDA College, we have a three minute preview taken last year.

SEDA College (YouTube Channel)
SEDA College (Official Website)

This adventure wouldn’t be complete without some traditional Irish music, so let’s stop into Hogans and get a close-up, 360° view.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Communications Concepts, Inc. (YouTube Channel)
Communications Concepts, Inc. (Official Website)

There you have it. I hope you enjoyed this brief virtual vacation, and the good news is that you still have plenty of time to head out and celebrate St. Paddy’s Day in your own way.

If you do decide to make a real Visit to Dublin for St. Patrick’s Day, then there are a few things that you should know, though.

Jameson Irish Whiskey (YouTube Channel)
Jameson Irish Whiskey (Official Website)

Happy St. Patrick’s Day Weekend!

Find out more about Ireland, Eruope and holidays …

Toy Worlds@Cosma

~ mehopper

I’ve got toys on the brain.

Why not? It ’tis toy season, after all!

Except that if you’ve been reading these posts for awhile, then you know I’ve had toys on the brain for many months now because I’ve been creating experimental interfaces to this site, and I’ve been using toys to do it 🙂

Cosma.org is a directory of some of the best content resources on the web, so showcasing great resources is the primary goal of this project. However another key goal has always been to provide a fun spatial interface to those great resources. There have been many versions of interfaces made in many ways over the years (HyperCard, SecondLife, Unity3D etc.). You can find out more about them on the Worlds page.

A funny thing happened while doing “previs” for a future version, though.

It turned out that using a RICOH THETA S 360° Camera and Kuula to hack together a demo led to an unexpectedly fun and useful interface.

This 360° image is the first in a series of Toy Worlds that serve as a 3D interface to Cosma.

Click on objects to find out about them.
Use the menu or doors to visit other Toy Worlds.

You can also explore this Toy World on Kuula.

Here is one of the earliest, less “polished” demos that I created before all of the Toy Worlds that are distributed across this site. There are some fun nooks and crannies to explore in this one!

While it is a bit “rough around the edges” relative to the other, later demos, it does have the advantage of having been shot in an actual dollhouse, so it is the most “toy season” appropriate Toy World demo of them all!

Bit of Backstory

I bought a RICOH THETA S 360° awhile ago.

I didn’t want me and/or the house in every shot as I learned to use the camera.

Then I had an idea! Why not use a lamp shade to cover the camera?

I tried that, but the only lamp shades in the house were too little to get a sense of the focal point and resolution in the shots.

There was lamp shade shopping to be done.

That is how I found myself in a Target with a lamp shade on my head checking out the view.


Ooops! 🙂

So, I found the perfect lamp shade and started to learn how to shoot 360° images.
Perfect Lamp Shade

Of course, inside a lamp shade is boring!

That’s why I also grabbed some cheap, silly stuff at Target when I got the lamp shade.

Next I decided to test out the 360° photo sharing service called Kuula.

It has the ability to add links, so I decided to make something more elaborate to test out the linking capabilities.

Here’s the first “shade world” that I created in order to test links in Kuula 🙂

It was around this time that I began to realize that a more elaborate version of this approach might work for doing “previs” for some “microworlds” that I plan to make and embed on this site when there is a sufficiently advanced way to show high quality and interactive 3D spaces on web pages.

I began going in that direction with this “microworld” that was my first experiment in using Kuula as a “previs” tool before creating something in a more robust platform like Unity3D.

Then I found this adorable dollhouse in a local antique shop, and I just had to start making some far more elaborate demos!

In order to get more objects in the dollhouse and provide closure to the space, I built it out with some wooden frames. Then those wooden frames turned out be so useful, they clearly took on a life of their own!

So, things went on from there to become the interface to Cosma that Toy Worlds are now — you will see many Toy Worlds distributed across this site.

At this point I’ve taken these demos to their natural conclusion as far as making interfaces to this site. My next adventure will involve either moving on to a new 3D/360° platform or going back to using Unity 3D for making visual interfaces to this site. You can watch for updates about my progress doing this on the Worlds page of this site.

While I’m not planning on creating any more Toy Worlds for this site, that doesn’t mean that there is no future for them.

I don’t know if you noticed, but Toy Worlds also happen to be a great, newfangled way to do those good old staple projects for elementary school students, dioramas.

I’m hoping that elementary school teachers and anyone who is raising an elementary school kid will not only get a kick out of exploring Toy Worlds@Cosma.org — they might also be inspired to create some of their own!

So there it is — I hope you enjoy Toy Worlds & Happy Holidays!

Find out more about Worlds@Cosma …

Exoplanet Junket

~ mehopper

This week NASA released a new project that they’ve dubbed the Exoplanet Travel Bureau.

The core of the project consists of a set of interactive 360° images that show “imagined” surfaces of five exoplanets (TRAPPIST-1e, Kepler-16b, Kepler-186f, PSO J318.5-22 and HD 40307 g). Here are three articles about the experience.

This Brilliant Interactive From NASA Lets You Virtually Explore Planets Far, Far Away (Jacinta Bowler, Science Alert)
Visit Exotic Exoplanets with NASA Visualization Tool (Mike Wall, Space.com)
NASA’s New VR Demo Puts You on Distant Exoplanets (Ryan Whitwam, Extreme Tech)

NASA’s new experience includes a feature that let’s you download snazzy travel posters for each of the planets, and those posters have a backstory of their own. Here’s a Buzz 60 story about three of the posters in the new project.

Buzz60 (YouTube Channel)
Buzz60 (Facebook Page)

Here’s a Slate article with some more background on the Work Projects Administration (WPA) See America poster series that inspired the style of NASA’s travel posters.

See America Through a Nostalgic Lens With These Neo-Vintage Travel Posters (Kristin Hohenadel, Slate)

This isn’t the first time that NASA has dabbled in publishing travel posters. The three exoplanet posters featured in the video are actually a subset of fifteen posters that NASA released in 2016 as a series entitled Visions of the Future.

Here are some links about the posters and where you can still download them for yourself.
Exotic Cosmic Locales Available as Space Tourism Posters (NASA/JPL)
Space Tourism Posters (NASA)
Visions of the Future Posters (NASA/JPL)

NASA also published this special page about the inspiration for the posters.
About Visions of the Future Posters (NASA/JPL)

Of course, the timing of the release of the Exoplanet Travel Bureau is no coincidence — it’s neatly timed to coincide with last month’s launch of NASA’s planet hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Here’s a short one minute explanation from NASA Goddard about what TESS will be doing.

NASA Goddard (YouTube Channel)
Goddard Space Flight Center (Official Website)

Find out more about planetary systems and planets near and far …

The Beach

~ mehopper

One long term goal of Cosma is to include an entertaining, interactive and immersive 3D Interface. There are already “demos” of what that might look like, but none of the available technologies are ideal, so there is no full implementation of the vision (yet).

The most recent demo is a fun little Toy World that started out as an experiment in using a 360° image as a “previs” tool for a full implementation in Unity3D.

Click on objects to find out about them.

You can also explore this Toy World on Kuula.

Stay tuned for more fun experiments soon!

Find out more on the Worlds and Worlds Challenge pages …

See also Beach, Lighthouse and Sandcastle

Around the World In …

~ mehopper

Once upon a time, back in the Victorian era a hundred years ago when Jules Verne was writing Around the World in Eighty Days, it took a little while to even vicariously circumnavigate the world by reading about it.

These days, thanks to professional video productions from groups like Travel Channel and Lonely Planet, you can feel like you’ve seen the world in far less time than it takes to read a book about it, and you can see it in considerably more vivid detail.

But now, thanks to the wonders of compilation, time-lapse and 360° video, you can make the journey even faster and with a far greater field of view than ever before. Here are links to three excellent examples from YouTube that together, appropriately enough, take eight minutes.

Daybreak Around the World (The New York Times)
The Best 360° Aerial Footage by AirPano (AirPano, YouTube)
Explore the World with IM360 (Ryan Whitehead, YouTube)

So, there it is — “Around the World in 8 Minutes,” and in 360° no less!

Of course, that just scratches the surface of how great 360° videos and other types of “3D virtual experiences” can take you to exotic places all around the world.

Check out Cosma’s newest Web World called Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa that is designed for exploring the World through 360° experiences!

Touch doorways to visit 360° experiences, and touch posters to find out more.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

Also, check out these recently updated pages on this site to see more fine-grained experience, but beware, there are enough experiences in the Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa and on these pages to take you around the world in about 800 hours!

Find out more about the World and how to travel around it…

Americas Canada, United States, Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina
Europe United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece
Africa Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, South Africa, Madagascar
Asia India, China, Japan
Oceania Australia, New Zealand
Polar Regions Arctic, Antarctica

Beach Gazes

~ mehopper

You know those “virtual fireplace videos” that you can play to feel all warm and cozy? Yes, there’s even a YouTube Channel for that 🙂

Well, there are some 360° Videos made to serve a similar purpose for a summertime feeling, so you can kick back, relax and imagine some sand between your toes anytime you want.

The best one I found was this beauty from Australia.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Australia (YouTube Channel)
Australia (Official Website)

You can also find a number of other nice 360° videos on their YouTube Channel.

Now if you prefer the real thing, here’s a video for that.

TenPlus.TV (YouTube Channel)
TenPlus.TV (Official Twitter)

You can always check with good old Dr. Beach to find the best sea, sand and sun near you (or further afield if you’re very motivated).

Find out more about Beaches …

TRAPPIST-1

~ mehopper

You’ve probably heard that NASA has found a trove of “Earth-like” planets circling the TRAPPIST-1 system roughly 40 light years away, but just in case you haven’t, here’s a short video from NASA/JPL about the discovery.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (YouTube Channel)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Official Website)

Most entertainingly, here’s a 360° YouTube video published by NASA/JPL that let’s you experience an artist’s conception of the view from the 4th planet in the system.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (YouTube Channel)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Official Website)

Here’s the text posted with the video as context.

This 360-degree panorama depicts the surface of a newly detected planet, TRAPPIST-1d, part of a seven planet system some 40 light years away. You can explore this artist’s rendering of an alien world by moving the view using your mouse or your mobile device. The depiction is based on the latest scientific data about this planetary system, and this world’s sister planets can be seen as bright points of light in a dark sky. Each world is roughly in Earth’s size range, in terms of both mass and diameter. Further observations will be needed to determine whether any or all of these worlds might be habitable.

Find out more about TRAPPIST 1 …

TRAPPIST 1 (NASA Exoplanets)
TRAPPIST 1 (Wikipedia)

Find out more about planetary systems, planets and astronomical instruments …

AirPano

~ mehopper

While reviewing the posts during “the move,” there was one glaring omission that emerged. It turns out that there was never a post about a fantastic Russian crew going by the name “AirPano” that has been traveling the world using drones to capture and publish fantastic 360° panoramic videos, and they have been doing it since before there were 360° YouTube videos. As soon as there was such a thing, they were doing that, too. It was very remiss to not “Spotlight” their work before this. Here’s their boiler info. off of their YouTube channel…

“AirPano is a not-for-profit project created by a team of Russian photo enthusiasts focused on taking high-resolution aerial panoramic photographs. Although we usually photograph from a helicopter, we also like to shoot from an airplane, a dirigible, a hot air balloon, and a radio-controlled helicopter. Today AirPano is the largest resource in the world — by geographical coverage, number of aerial photographs, and artistic and technical quality of the images — featuring 360° panoramas of the highest quality shot from a bird’s eye view.”

So true, so true, they are definitely not exaggerating. Check them out!

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

AirPano VR (YouTube Channel)
AirPano (Official Website)

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

AirPano VR (YouTube Channel)
AirPano (Official Website)

Here’s a great article about them!

A Cut Above the Rest: Stunning Drone Photographs Capture the New Seven Wonders of the World Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before (Becky Pemberton, Daily Mail UK)

Find out more about them!

AirPano (Official Site)
AirPano (YouTube)
AirPano (Facebook)

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