Last winter we made this virtual tour of the green Holiday ski run in Hirafu, it starts near the top of the run and finishes at the bottom. There are nine different spots within the virtual tour, it’s like Google Street View but for a ski run.
You can look up, down, left, right and all around by using your keyboards arrow keys or clicking and dragging the mouse if you’re looking at this on a PC or Mac. If you’re looking at it on a smart phone or tablet you can simply move the image around with your finger.
There are hot spots (a little white target) in the image that you can click or tap on that will move to the next spot in the virtual tour.
There are a few other controls for the virtual tour, starting on the left they are:
- Directions, if you don’t want to use the view controls described above you can simply click on the one of the four directional arrows to move the view point of the image to where you want to look.
- Zoom in and out, you can use the directional arrows, the scroll wheel on your mouse or the gestures on your smart phone or iPad to zoom in and out of the image.
- Stop or Start Auto Rotation, by default the image starts to move to give you a friendly nudge and wink to show it’s more than just an image. This button toggles the Auto Rotation to start or stop, it’s a nice feature if you want to look at a particular part of the image.
- Information, this just has the location name, the year the image was taken and the spot within the virtual tour. For example 1/9 is the start of the tour and 9/9 is the end.
- Change Control Mode, just like all good POV computer games you can invert the control direction so that it moves in your preferred direction.
- Full screen, it works well on a desktop computer but not on a smart phone or tablet. Click the button and the image will fill your PC screen, push the “Escape” key to return to your web browser.
In order for the virtual tour to work well on all devices we have kept the file size quite low to have a nice balance of image quality and fast download. It would be possible to do this at a really high resolution but it would take a long time to load!
Experience the closest thing to being on the Holiday ski run without actually being there…
