http://www.immersive360.com A video conversion from a high resolution full screen panorama Virtual Tour created by Immersive360

For an amazing interactive media presentation visit the link below:

http://www.hotels.immersive360.com/flashnew

BEESKER

Beesker recommends ‘Acropolis 360′ as the world’s best website on the Acropolis

ABOUT ‘ACROPOLIS 360‘

The Acropolis 360 website is produced by Immersive360, a media company based in London, England. Immersive360 technology provides web-based virtual tours, suited to the presentation of historic and cultural treasures.

The Acropolis 360 website provides a map of the Acropolis Hill in Athens, within which are located nine panoramas. The panoramas cover: Pillopapou Hill, Acropolis, Dionysos Theatre, Herodeion Theatre, Theseion Temple, Areios Pagos, Kermikos, Syntagma Metro, and Lycabettus Hill. Each of these provides a full screen high resolution spherical panorama, with zoomable images for close up viewing. The panoramas can be panned horizontally and vertically by dragging the mouse cursor across the images. There is an accompanying sound track for each panorama.

The website can be viewed using dial-up or broadband connection. There is a related section on the Elgin Marbles.

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A groundbreaking international conference, 5D: The Future of Immersive Design explores the profound impact of rapidly changing technologies in design for narrative media — film and television, game design, animation, interactive media, architecture and environment — for artists, designers, scholars, educators, and students.

Our definition of narrative media is changing rapidly as traditional storytelling disciplines expand and converge. A new breed of designer is emerging who can flow freely between the real and the virtual; between media and across cultures.

Presented by the University Art Museum (UAM) at California State University, Long Beach and the Art Directors Guild (ADG), this international conference assembles the design world’s leading pioneers and academics in an open exchange of ideas and insights about new design processes within the entertainment industry and the delivery of the immersive experience.

The event, already stirring great interest, will be attended by over 500 award-winning production designers and art directors, visual and digital artists, designers, architects, animators, as well as leading academics in these fields and their students: the future of the industry.

For more info visit the site: http://www.5dconference.com/

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.

We are working to  ensure the textual content of our new PanoFlash™ product will be indexable by the new Flash indexing algorith, adding further value to our innovative new Virtual Tour Presentation products.

Source: Google Blog

The internet, mobile phones and MP3 players are revolutionising how Britons spend their time, says Ofcom’s annual report. It reveals that older media such as TV, radio and DVDs are being abandoned in favour of modern technology . It also shows that women, in some age groups, are the dominant web users and older web users spend more time online than any group. Among children it showed that internet and mobile phone use is growing at the expense of video games.

Digital Britain

“As a whole people are using communications services more than they were five years ago,” said James Thickett, Ofcom’s research director. The 330-page report takes a comprehensive look at the way Britons use new and old media and reveals a nation in love with its media, gadgets and hi-tech gear. The average Briton now spends 50 hours per week on the phone, using the net, watching TV or listening to the radio. However, the mix of how much time is spent on each one has changed radically over the last few years. Daily mobile phone use is up 58% on 2002 and, over the same period, net use has grown 158%. By contrast Britons spend far less time watching TV, listening to the radio or chatting on a fixed line phone. T he report, the fourth annual survey from Ofcom, revealed big differences in the technologies that different sectors of the population prefer.

• Among Britons aged 25-34, women account for 55% of the time this group spends online
• 16% of Britons aged 65+ spend 42 hours per month online - more than any other age group
• More than 75% of 11 year olds have their own TV, games console and mobile phone
• 15% of 13-15 year olds and 7% of 10 year olds have their own webcam

Young people now spend as much time on their mobile phone as they do playing computer and console games. Proving more popular among younger people are mobile music players and using the net. Declining among younger people was listening to the radio and playing video and computer games.

“Young people have always had a lot of distractions for their time,” said Alison Winter, head of research at commercial radio’s industry body Radio Centre. Research carried out by the Radio Centre showed, she said, that although overall hours of listening among some groups are falling people are being smarter about how they listen. Many sought out podcasts or looked online for shows they had missed, said Ms Winter. Also, she said, had the radio on while they were online or used other communication services.

Ofcom’s report echoed this observation and said Britons were getting increasingly sophisticated in their use of communications technologies. For instance, a teenager playing an online game might take a picture of a high score or achievement unlocked while they play then text or e-mail it to friends or add it to a website or Facebook page.

The report also revealed that patterns of use could change again as the latest technologies come into wider use. It revealed that the UK now has about 450,000 subscribers to high-definition services. Of those questioned by Ofcom, 43% said they watched more TV since getting HD. A minority of that group, 36%, said they now watched six or more extra hours of TV every week. Ownership of a Digital Video Recorder also seems to have a significant effect on viewing habits. Ofcom found that many prefer to watch programmes saved on their DVR rather than a DVD.

Mr Thickett said the watchdog had seen two big trends over the last 12 months. He told BBC News: “We’ve seen a need for greater control of the services you are getting and we’ve seen this by sales of digital video recorders. “Second is a need for greater mobility. People are increasingly using their mobile devices for a range of functions such as camera, downloading music or listening to the radio,” he said. The report also revealed that although Britons are using more media and technology than ever they are spending less on it. “For the second consecutive year in a row the price of communication services has fallen,” said Mr Thickett. Ofcom said strong competition and the “bundling” of services had let the communications industry realise economies of scale and drive prices lower. The monthly household spend on communications is now £92.65. In 2005 that monthly spend was £94.03. “It’s great for consumers,” he said, “they are getting greater choice at lower prices than have ever been had.”

Source: BBC

Continuing our Facebook Tips series, this one is about content. The key to a successful Facebook page is adding content that is going to be interesting to other people visiting your page. “Like what”? I hear you ask. Well you may well have heard the phrase ‘People buy people’ and this is really the key element that Facebook, can bring to your business marketing. It allows you to put a human face on your business. If you are a small business it will just be you, but even larger businesses can use Facebook. You already have a pool of people with specialist skills, set them up with a Facebook page each and they can all connect with your company page immediately adding fans. Pick a range of people who have different interests or specialisations to add dynamic content to your.

Most successful people in business are passionate about what they do and believe it or not this can be interesting to other people. Talk about what you know best, Talk about what’s going on in your industry, generally, not just in your own business. Announce news and events relevant to what you do and become a portal for information in your area of expertise. In reality for business users Facebook should be an extension of your website, or even better an extension of your Blog (you do have a blog DONT YOU!) but with a more personal touch, so include some information about you too.

While I’m mentioning blogs, did you know you can include all your blog entries in your Facebook page automatically have a look at ours here!!

How great is that!! and next time I’ll show you how. The first think to do when you set up your Facebook page is do a search for everyone you know and invite as a friend, do this for all your clients too!

Over the next few weeks will be posting a series on Facebook for business users and why you should have a profile and business page on Facebook. In terms of social networking Facebook is the fastest growing network globally. Facebook surpassed MySpace last year and currently is expanding at the rate of over 1 million new users per week WOW!!!
So first off why use Facebook at all. Well the shear scale of Facebook offers exposure on a scale that would have cost you thousand of pounds a few years ago and only achievable via cross media campaign using TV, radio and national press advertising. This scale of exposure can reduce your ‘time to market’ dramatically. What business wouldn’t want that.

Top Tip:

Well of course our first tip has to be GET A FACEBOOK PROFILE! Excuse me for getting carried away there. If you want to use Facebook for your business, you still need to set up a personal Facebook page first, once you have done this you can create a business page attached to your personal profile. How, did I hear you ask? Once you have created your personal profile, at the bottom of the page you will find a link ‘Create a Page for your Business’.

More Hot Tips coming next week.

Whether you are a large or small business you can always benefit from creating a YouTube Video account to promote your business.

Everyone probably knows YouTube is a video-sharing website where anyone - including businesses - can upload videos for others to view. Having an account in YouTube offering easy accesible video content is always useful, especially in a time when the use of video on the internet has increased vertically. In Alexa ranking of the most polular sites globally, Youtube is in 3rd position just behind Yahoo and Google so you can see the kind of exposure it gets.

Some people may say using YouTube doesn’t add to a professional profile for a company. We would disagree with this. Although YouTube videos don’t have the greatest quality, if you are concerned about this you can always use your YouTube account to host “preview videos” and host better quality full versions on your own website. The point about YouTube is exposure!

On the issue of quality we recommend the following:

• Start with the best possible quality, so don’t over compress your video when putting it together. Ideally use as little compression as possible at this stage and start with the original codec your video was captured with.Use H.264, it is a high quality compression codec. You want YouTube’s compressor to work with the best quality possible. The bitrate we recommend you try is 2000kbps — we will go into this more later.
• Resize your video to 320×240 this will match YouTube’s native resolution when you encode. The idea is you want YouTube to do as little as possible to your video . This removes one step for YouTube and will also speed up the time it takes for your video to be accessible online. This is also where the bit rate comes back in. 320×240 video running at 2000kbps is almost lossless in quality. H.264 is designed to look good at much lower bit rates. By oversampling your video to 320×240 and using such a high bitrate you will get very good results.
• Deinterlace your video when you encode. As it is yet another thing YouTube will do for you if you don’t.
• If you shot your video in widescreen use letterboxing to make it fit 320×240’s or 4×3 aspect ratio. YouTube only has support for one aspect ratio, if you upload wide video it will be squished.
• If you are posting a long video that is over 100MB (which is the YouTube limit) when using the 2000kbps h.264 codec, adjust the bitrate until you get something that is as close to 100MB as possible.

Here is a sample of YouTube Video Created using this method -

YouTube is a free hosting site. It is an ideal place to organize and keep your videos and from there you can link to your video’s on YouTube or even embed them into other web-pages directly including your website and Blog. YouTube automatically provide the code to embed your video into a web-page and it’s as easy as ‘cut & paste’. Also others can link to you videos, further increasing your exposure.

So what kind of videos can you use in your YouTube account that would be of benefit. Basically anything that helps you promote your business, TV presentations or interviews, workshops or seminar speeches, client testimonials, product showcases and reviews, instructional video or ‘hands on’ video demonstrations, footage from trade shows and conference events, ‘in progress’ videos for long term projects, a ‘walk-around’ of your new factory installation of property development, time-lapse video to show long processes quickly. The list is endless, you would be amazed what people are interested in.

Through careful use of your YouTube account and advertising it by participating in video responses, comments or groups related to your business you can draw people’s attention to your website and increase traffic, but the key to all this is to have created videos that people will be interested to watch. Also remember you will have 2 audiences on YouTube, your existing clients where you can inform them with samples of videos about the work you have done so far and everyone else, any one of whom may just be your next customer.

The internet is s gateway to a global audience. Use it widely and wisely too to promote your business and get the most out of it. This post is on our Blog page . Visit our Immersive360 YouTube account with samples of our projects and videos.

Proposed by ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) and approved by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) World Heritage Day was established in 1983. With a new theme every year; 2008 is Religious Heritage and Sacred Places. Virtual Tour technology is a fantastic way of experiencing heritage locations that you are not able to visit in person. With this in mind we are making a Virtual Tour of one of the worlds greatest religious and cultural monuments, the Athens Acropolis!

All you need to do is have Google Earth 4.2 (or later) installed on your computer and then download and open the kml file available HERE and from our main website www.immersive360.com from the 18th of April onwards. A link to the panorama tour will be installed in your Places palette. Click on the link under Temporary Places and you will automatically be taken to the first panorama. To exit the panorama click on Exit Photo (top right) or click on one of the icons you can see for other locations in the tour.

The kml file once downloaded is auto updating and we will be adding new locations in the near future including more locations in Greece, including the 2004 Athens Olympic event sites.

Once you have exited the panorama you can see it as a sphere. We have positioned them above ground level so they don’t interfere with the 3D models.

Download the KML file here

The following is a short video to show how it works -

Interesting Links:

www.acropolis360.com

UNESCO Heritage Events Calendar

List of World Heritage sites in Europe

World Heritage Interactive Map