Real Tour Vision can now claim to have virtualized a whole country! Now that must be a first in the immersive photography business!
Our full service provider in South Africa, Virtual Africa, has just completed a project wherein they compiled over a 100 scenic virtual tours of South Africa.
“It has taken 8 months, 60,000 pictures, stitching about five thousand 360 degree panoramic images and a whole lot of travelling, but we’re very proud of the end result” says Tinus le Roux, CEO and founder of Virtual Africa. “We would never have been able to pull it off, if not for our partnership with Real Tour Vision. The superior quality of the tours got us the job in the first place, but the scalability of the tour management system and their ongoing support, allowed us to get it done.”
Virtual Africa has been using RTV’s photo stitching software and virtual tour system since 2002 and has focused most of their attention on the South African tourism market.
They have created interactive virtual tours for hotels, guest houses and safari lodges in and around South Africa and it is safe to say that they are moving toward market dominance in a country where tourism is booming like never before.
With the 2010 Soccer World Cup fast approaching, the need for media rich content and information regarding this fascinating country is increasing by the month. The South African Tourism Board identified this need and commissioned Virtual Africa to compile virtual tours of the most important tourism destinations in the country.
What makes it even more exciting is the fact that Virtual Africa has put all the virtual tours in a Google Earth file, which you can download from their website www.virtualafrica.co.za. When you open this file, it will populate Google Earth with a placemark for each of the tours they created. Google Earth must be installed on your machine to view the file.
So, if you want to see Nelson Mandela’s jail cell on Robben Island, enjoy the beauty of Cape Town or simply see why South Africa is such a popular tourism destination – go ahead, open the file in Google Earth and fly over to Africa for a virtual 360 degree vacation.
Tinus le Roux