Last week I wrote Enchanted Beach Houses where I explained how I was inspired to create the Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa. It’s a “virtual travel” application with a visual interface to over a hundred 3D and 360° experiences.
In case you didn’t see it, here it is again.
If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.
You can use the above interface or these posters to visit all seven “Web Worlds.”
One thing that I regretted was that I couldn’t include more 3D and 360° experiences.
There just wasn’t enough room in the Villa to link to the hundreds of experiences that I’ve included on the pages on Cosma.
For example, I had to decide whether to include the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre?
I ultimately decided to leave off the Louvre.
That means that there are links to virtual experiences on the page about France on Cosma that are not in the Europe Room in the Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa.
Here are examples of experiences that you will see links to on Cosma that are not in the Villa.
I found myself leaving out a lot of museum experiences, and I was particularly sad to leave out experiences for some of the greatest art museums. That’s why I decided that this old Toy WorldWalk-in-Art could use an upgrade.
This is the old world. Click on paintings to see 3D and 360° experiences.
Then I watched it again “just for fun,” and that led to a “side adventure” that grew into this post.
That’s because watching the Niagara Falls video led to YouTube suggesting another minute long 360° video of a zipline ride in Cañon City, Colorado within Royal Gorge Bridge & Park.
Then another 360° video of a zipline ride by Superfly Ziplines in Whistler, British Columbia popped up. Again, only a minute long — innocent enough, why not?
How beautiful, not to mention seasonally appropriate, was that!?!? Show me more!
The next 360° video that YouTube suggested was of a ride at Zip World in Wales.
Wahoooo! Notice that the speedometer on the video said 100 MPH!
That ride turns out to have been on the longest zipline in Europe and the fastest in the world. Great to experience virtually, but probably terrifying in real life!
A Google search showed that Zip World is a sort of playground for grown-ups with a number of jungle gym like “destinations.” Here’s a non-360° video about what they offer.
After watching ten 360° videos of zipline rides in under 15 minutes, it occurred to me that ziplining is a “thing” at tourist destinations, and taking 360° videos of the rides is too. I couldn’t help but wonder, how many more 360° video clips of rides are there out there?
A YouTube search for zipline+360 turned up hundreds of results from all over the world!
Better yet, the rides themselves are only about a minute’ish long, by definition, and they’ve got great bird’s-eye views of scenery that you wouldn’t see otherwise. If you’re into seeing great places, what a way to do it!
Happy Zipping 🙂
If you enjoy adventures with a side of adrenaline then check out these other posts …
I concluded my last post about Sand Art with highlighting how Booking.com offered the chance to stay in a sandcastle as a promotion for Coney Island’s Sand Sculpting Competition. Here’s a link with more on that unusual “opportunity.”
That may have sounded like a one-off type of oddity, but in truth, it wasn’t.
Booking.com is known for cooking up some “unique” promotions. For example, here’s a silly clip on what they did for that illustrious holiday, National Avocado Day.
No matter what your passion happens to be, there’s bound to be a place to stay for it.
The reason that I’m so aware of this is because awhile ago, with amusement, I realized that there’s some sort of lodging related to almost every subject on Cosma. Sometimes those experiences end up as adventures like Sand Art. That’s why I have a huge stash of links to “thematic” lodging that range from mildly amusing to pretty wild.
For example, there’s some kind of place to visit for what ever kind of transportation.
There’s also a place called Kakslauttanen Arctic Resort in Saariselka, Finland where you can have all sorts of winter fun and then chill in glass igloos and watch the northern lights.
If something isn’t covered in this post or those sites, then you can probably find something with a search for “Your+Interest+Hotel 🙂
That’s how I found a place for my inner librarian called the Library Hotel. It’s on Madison Avenue in New York City, and the rooms are organized by Dewey Decimal! Here’s a link to a video about it.
So, next time you are booking lodging, I hope you will consider looking for something a bit less “traditional” that will fit your interests and maybe even become an adventure in its own right!
I was searching YouTube when a video about “fair chimneys” came up in my results.
It sounded so whimsical, I couldn’t resist checking it out.
It turns out that fairy chimneys are geological formations, also known as hoodoos, that form within sedimentary and volcanic rock in dry, hot areas around the world.
While that may not be that interesting, the video about them is quite enticing. It’s footage of an area of Turkey called Cappadocia where fairy chimneys have been carved out to be homes, churches and even whole villages for millennia.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this “fairy chimney” inspired adventure.
If you’ve become as enchanted as I have with Cappadocia’s fairy chimneys, cave hotels and hot air balloons, maybe even added visiting them to your bucket list, then here are some links to where you can learn more.
One of the more entertaining stories to hit the net recently was a tale of some hearty Kiwis who successfully got away from a local alcohol ban by building their own island in nearby international waters.
Fun stuff, but these guys were certainly not the first to cook up a politically motivated scheme to get away from it all at sea. The concept has a long, albeit somewhat dubious, history. Pirates and the whole Water World fiasco aside, way back in 1960s there was a relatively well publicized, but ill-fated experiment dubbed Operation Atlantis.
More recently, there’s the Seasteaders. They periodically provide updates about how their vision of a floating utopia is just around the corner.
Further afield, here’s a TED talk that presents a take on reasons to take to the seas. It does include a few obligatory libertarian cultural allusions to things like Burning Man, but it also covers environmentally responsible reasons for the movement like safety, sustainability as well as much needed new additions for cities and slums.
If you watch the talk all the way through, you will see that it also covers a few more exotic topics like private floating islands (i.e. really, really huge yachts). If you’ve never come across that concept before, there are hundreds of videos about floating private islands on Youtube.
Now, if you truly love the idea of getting away from it all for libertarian leaning reasons, you could always join the Asgaurdians. Asgardia is Igor Ashurbeyli’s plan for taking the idea of sovereign nation to space. The Asgardians did launch a satellite, but no one is suggesting that if you want to move in with them, you won’t have a long, long wait.
Finally, if you are in a position where headlines like this are not terribly relevant, you may be wishing for a good old fashioned, non-politically motivated island escape. If so, then here’s a nice 360° video from Down Under for you.
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.
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.
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…
