DiscEx: Discover, Explore – Virtual tour web software

UPDATE 9/14/2011: UT has removed this code from their website. The software was basically a poor-man’s Google Streetview, with individual photos taken around the sculpture, rather than a panoramic in a QTVR-style viewer. Unfortunately, I don’t have the code or the images anymore. No big loss, since it was implemented as a Java Applet when these days it would be much more appropriate as a web app. One day I’ll revive (or perhaps it’s better to say, resurrect) this project. -Al

This is an applet I did in my junior year at UT for my software engineering course. It’s implemented as a Java applet, and looking back that was precisely the wrong technology to use. I plan on doing an updated, web-based Javascript version soon. In the meantime, here it is.

The virtual tour site is of the Umlauf Sculpture Garden in Austin, TX. We took several hundred photos of the garden (which came to about a gigabyte of images), but had to size them down for bandwidth considerations. The originals were lost in a disk crash.

Ideally, I’d like to recreate this software to be easy to use and allow people to visit other places in a more natural manner. I’m still working out the feature list and applications of this software.
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/s2s/latest/sculpture1/src/DiscEx/applet.html – DiscEx: Discover, Explore (LINK NO LONGER WORKS)

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