Aral Balkan

I got an unexpected phone call from a writer at one of the prominent Turkish newspapers this morning, asking me about the launch of the No.10 Virtual Tour project. A quick Google search revealed that the BCC has a story on it and that other media outlets have begun reporting about it.

The reporter did mention that the press release issued by No.10 included a link to my blog but not my contact information so he had to Google me for my number (yep, guilty as charged, I never have gotten round to putting my contact information on my blog) so here goes: If you're trying to reach me regarding the No.10 story, you can call me on +44 779 555 1278. You can also find details on the No.10 project on this blog post that I wrote earlier.

I'm not entirely sure I said exactly what I'm being quoted as saying in the BBC article (apart from the "I thought it was too interesting a project to pass up" bit, which is from the blog post linked above) but, no matter, the project definitely was enlightening and fun and, given the constraints, I don't think it turned out too shabby! :)

Comments

• I'm amazed at the quality of production on the Number 10 Tour - especially for that budget. As a 'tax-payer' I do not feel ripped off in the slightest. Quite the opposite in fact. The Taj Mahal site is ok, the Number 10 Tour is potentially award-winning. No contest. Not even comparable. Stupid to even try in the first place. Great stuff Aral.

  by Pete on 2007-01-03 16:04:04

• I have to say that the "Virtual Tour of No. 10 Downing Street" is one of the poorest examples of virtual tours that I have seen in recent years. The photography is poor with frequent over-exposure in many of the rooms. There is a very limited "look up and down" indicating that a not-very-wide-angle lens was used. The display engine shows excessive jaggies as the picture is panned and then even when the mouse button is released. There is also serious "colour banding" in some of the rooms. There does not appear to be any zoom in or out. There is no audio introducing the rooms or identifying objects in them and not even any ambient music. The "glow" around objects in the room is hideous. The drop down interface becomes irritating after one or two uses of it. The text describing the objects in the rooms is pretty boring. There is no plan showing where you are in the building or what rooms adjoin which. Even for a small bill of £10,000 I think the taxpayer, who presumably is paying for the exercise, has been seriously ripped off. For some examples of how it should be done, look at our website [Aral: Link removed. I do not appreciate spam on this blog, nor do I feel compelled to raise your pagerank.]

  by William Beckett on 2006-12-31 11:10:40

• William, From an outsider's view, I enjoyed No. 10 much more than the Taj Mahal tour offered via armchair-travel.com*. Its (No. 10's) navigation was clear, it offered a simple interaction mechanism (the 'glowing objects'), and the subject matter was interesting. On Armchair Travel, there's simply too much irrelevant information shown (ads everywhere), inconsistent navigation, and confusing UI (sometimes a Flash movie...sometimes a new popup for a video...) for it to be a clean, informative experience. $.02 from someone who doesn't do Flash virtual tours... * Aral: I edited the links so that they point directly to the No.10 and Taj Mahal tours. Both so people can compare them directly and because I do not wish to up the pagerank of Mr. Beckett's web site.

  by Joe Rinehart on 2006-12-31 15:55:24

• hi, Aral I think, what you have done is great. it couldn't be better with a low budget and also the time you were given to finish it. I'd like to quote Microsoft's IE Team Leader to support your position: " Q: If you had more time, is there a new feature you would have liked to include in IE7? A: Dean Hachamovitch: Yes, several come to mind. None were more important than shipping. "

  by ozgur uksal on 2006-12-31 18:01:25

• William: When I first started reading your comment, my initial thought was that you didn't like the virtual tour (fair enough) and, based on the ferociousness of your tone, that you were probably having a bad day (does happen, no big deal). Having read the end of your comment, however, I have to strongly question your ethics. Your company creates virtual tours and here you are publicly bashing a tour by another developer, and on that developer's blog too. Very cheeky to say the least. However, you do not stop there. You also provide a link to your own web site, advertising your own services. This basically amounts to spam. Thus, I have removed your link from your comment but I'm leaving the one in Joe Rinehart's comment (love your work, by the way, Joe) so that people can see for themselves the MySpace-style travesty that you appear to believe is "how it should be done." Regarding the specific points that you raise in your public competitive analysis/bashing:

  The photography is poor with frequent over-exposure in many of the rooms.

  Fair enough. I completely concede that the photography could have been of a much higher standard. However, we had a single day in which to photograph eight rooms. Thus, this did not leave us enough time to light each room separately and we had to triage the situation. We ended up lighting mostly for the detail shots and using natural light whenever possible for the panoramas. If we had had enough time and budget, we would have lit every shot for every room. Given the budget, however, this would have led to a week-long shoot and we would have had the most amazing photographs and nothing more. Thus, it was a matter of: Does this project get done at all or does it not. Given the amount of time we had for the shoot I am very happy with the results. Both our photographers went above and beyond to ensure that we got all the rooms covered, shooting thousands of photographs in a single day in the process.

  There is a very limited “look up and down” indicating that a not-very-wide-angle lens was used.

  As opposed to the total lack of vertical range (the correct term for what you call "look up and down") in your Taj Mahal tour? :)

  The display engine shows excessive jaggies as the picture is panned and then even when the mouse button is released.

  Ah, bulls-eye. In retrospect, this is the one thing I would have done differently if I could redo the project or if there was any budget to have another iteration on it. Doing real-time perspective correction on the images cut preproduction time but the resulted in the jaggies you mention due to the way the images are sliced at runtime. Doing perspective correction during pre-production would have corrected this. That said, looking at your Taj Mahal tour, you conveniently avoid this problem by ignoring it completely. The Taj Mahal tour doesn't use perspective correction at all. You use the non-perspective corrected images with their fisheye distortions and merely slide the image along the x-axis. That isn't a true panorama -- it's a cop-out. Before you criticize the jaggies in the No.10 virtual tour, please make sure that you're actually implementing perspective correction in your own. As I suggested, above, the best way to do this would be to perspective-correct the photographs in pre-production. Of course, merely sliding them from side to side won't work in Flash if you want vertical range but I'll leave you to find out how to correctly position a perspective-corrected panoramic image in Flash by yourself.

  There does not appear to be any zoom in or out.

  You can zoom in and out by using the ⇧ and ⌘ keys. This is not documented, however, and neither is it a key feature of the tour. Contrary to popular belief, great experiences are not created by lumping together as many features as possible but by layering your UI so that the most important features are as transparent and intuitive as possible. To properly implement a zoom feature that is not initially bandwidth hungry and streams well you would have to dynamically load images of varying resolutions from the server. A simple scale-based zoom is simply an effect that does not carry much utility at all as you are not actually increasing the resolution of the image as you zoom in.

  There is no audio introducing the rooms or identifying objects in them and not even any ambient music.

  Narration ("audio introducing the rooms") was a feature that we discussed implementing at the earliest stages of the project. In fact, I proposed that we use alpha-channel video to have an on-screen narrator composited into the rooms. This would have been a great feature and, implemented correctly, a wonderful self-voicing accessibility aid for the visually-challenged, but, unfortunately, the client decided that they did not have the budget for it. Recording narration for a professional project requires more than the developer plugging a microphone into their laptop. You require a professional studio and professional voice talent. For an alpha-channel video shoot, you require green-screen facilities in a video studio alongside the acting talent. You also require a crew to light the set, direct, record audio and shoot video. All of this takes budget. One of my film instructors during my undergraduate degree once told me something I'll never forget: When I was getting worried that we had missed the first few minutes of an event we were supposed to be filming, he told me: "It's not about quantity, it's about quality." Again, I repeat: Building experiences/software/web sites/etc. is not a pissing contest to see how many features you can cram in. It's about implementing those features that your audience needs and implementing them properly.

  The text describing the objects in the rooms is pretty boring.

  You may want to write to the Prime Minister's office on that one as they produced the text. Personally, I find it factual and succinct.

  There is no plan showing where you are in the building or what rooms adjoin which.

  If you had read through my project postmortem, you would have understood that we were not allowed to create such a plan due to security concerns.

  Even for a small bill of £10,000 I think the taxpayer, who presumably is paying for the exercise, has been seriously ripped off.

  Now, up until this point I was mildly amused by your comments -- and I have responded to those points that I felt had merit (or deserved correction), above. It's unfortunate that you felt threatened enough by the No.10 Virtual Tour to publicly bash the project on my own blog -- a show of poor taste at the very least -- and to spam my blog with a link to your web site, advertising your services. It was also unnecessary, as I am actually not in competition with you at all. But when you state that the taxpayer "has been seriously ripped off", I take offense at that statement and feel compelled to set you straight on it. We delivered the project within budget (that's *under* £10K, not £10K for the record) and on schedule. Given the constraints, I am proud of what we produced and proud of the team that produced it. The taxpayer, if anything, got a bargain. When billions of pounds are being wasted on failed NHS projects and on invading middle-eastern countries, how do you have the audacity, sir, to state that a project that was delivered within budget and on schedule is an example of the taxpayer being "seriously ripped off"? I categorically deny the validity of your claim. Your words are libelous and I strongly caution you to take better account of the meaning of your words in public discourse in the future.

  by aral on 2007-01-01 17:21:38

• Aral You say we don't provide perspective corrected images !!! Wrong! Since our Explore the Taj Mahal site is designed to be accessible to dialup visitors, we do not "force" the large QT or Java panos onto every viewpoint. You just click on "View with QuickTime" or "View with Java" buttons to see the higher resolution panos. If you'd taken any time with our site, you might have discovered why our virtual tour was the ONLY tour (of ten reviewed) which was rated FIVE STARS by the Sunday Times. "A thrillingly executed Virtual Tour ... ... [their] Taj Mahal offers a benchmark ... ... Ravishing ... Sumptuous ..." - The Sunday Times Perhaps you should look again? Regards, William Donelson Armchair Travel Co Ltd

  by William Donelson on 2007-01-25 18:49:52

• Just to let you know, people who took the time to actually tour our site said: " [ Explore the Taj Mahal ] ... is Astounding ! " - About.com " Wow ! ... A thrillingly executed Virtual Tour ... Exotic ... Ravishing ... Sumptuous ... 5 Stars ! " - The Sunday Times, London (full article online) " Sites like yours are inspirational in terms of the way you've translated a three-dimensional lived experience into an online 2-D format! Kudos to you and your team! " - Désirée Pointer, Ph.D., Knowledge Media Lab - The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching " The Taj is one of those sights that disappoints few visitors, and the same can be said of its counterpart on the web. " - Sunday Telegraph, London " The site is a visual treat! " - Computers At Home, India " An excellent interactive Flash presentation of the Taj Mahal, with a map of the complex, and panoramic photos of both the grounds and the interiors of the buildings. " - Greg Cruey, Asia for Visitors, About.com " Changing our view of the world, forever. " - The Daily Mail, London " Marvelous multimedia site offers fine images and interesting narration on the origins and architecture of the monument and the historical events that relate to it. " - Melissa Snell, History.About.com " Incredible! " - TimeOut Magazine, London " What a wonderful site you have developed! " - K. Kris Hirst, Archaeology.About.com " 5-Star " - Schoolzone.co.uk, online report " Terrific! " - MacDirectory.com, online report " A comprehensive virtual tour of this stunning monument. " - Open Directory Project, online " How utterly Cool! ... The Taj Mahal site is stunning... " - MacCentral.com, reader

  by William Donelson on 2007-02-19 15:03:17

• Aral, I was fascinated when I came across your project since it ties very closely to a technology I am researching. To help explain this new technology I contrasted it against the "challenges" that you faced in this project. I believe you will find this technology interesting as it may have helped you execute this project more effectively (drastically reducing your post production time) and with lower expenses. It is a 3D technology vs. a panoramic technology. The technology is from an inside-looking-out viewpoint, NOT an outside-looking-in viewpoint. Please take a look if this is of interest -- feel free to contact me if you would like more details on how this works. The video about the project can be seen here: http://www.madmarketeer.com/ProjectSUTI3D.

  by Katharine Coles on 2007-04-17 08:16:29