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1. Interactive Watersheds – Immersive & Realistic Virtual Tours
Similar Interactive Watersheds web site projects have been produced for five different “Community Based” watershed projects across the United States. These include the Potomac Watershed Partnership in Maryland, Virginia & Washington D.C. area, Conasauga River Alliance in Georgia, Coalition for the Upper South Platte in Colorado, Upper Sevier River Community Watershed Project in Utah, and the Pit River Watershed Alliance in California. A U.S, map with links to each of this project can be found at the following Internet address:
http://www.interactivewatersheds.net/uswtrmap.html
This Interactive Watershed web site demonstration allows a person to learn how to navigate around one of these watersheds using digital terrain maps to locate specific spots to visit. This is accomplished by providing immersive 360-degree panorama views that the user can move around to see a complete circular view. Newer cubic panoramas we photographed and developed in the fall of 2001 allow the user to see the sky above and the ground below as well. The user can also zoom in and out of the panorama for a closer look at details. Inside of the panoramas are “Hot Spots” that let the user access a wealth of additional visual information. In any one panorama these hot spots might bring up another panorama, or additional pages with text and pictures to provide more specific detail about the location. Audio/video segments showing a resource person standing in the location and describing an important issue or restoration project may also be available as a hot spot selection.
One advantage of the Upper Sevier River Community Watershed web site, used for this demonstration, is that repeat panorama photography has been done in a few places. This provides a visual monitoring of the changes that take place over time. In the instructions below we provide a way for you to find a few of these locations quickly.
Mountain Visions began exploratory photography work in the Upper Sevier Watershed during one week in July of 2000. This material helped us produce a multimedia prototype proposal for the Interactive Watershed project. With this first project, an Interactive Watershed web site template was developed that also had input from several other interested watershed groups. More photography was done in the Upper Sevier watershed during weeklong periods in June and September of 2001. Finally, additional field photography was shot during the last week of July of 2002 to document locations, effects and management efforts related to the Sanford 2002 fire event that had recently occurred within the perimeter of the watershed.
If you spent quite a bit of time investigating the Upper Sevier web site or any of the other Interactive Watershed web site projects, you would notice that they are all still a “work in progress.” Additional, updated and new information can be added to existing web pages or new pages can be produced as desired for years into the future. As an example, the entire Sanford Fire 2002 project could be considered to be a sub-website that was added to the original interface design last fall. This will be described in more detail in the demonstration below.
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