History of the project
I began shooting interactive 360° panoramas immediately after the technology was invented by Apple Computer. My first panoramas, beginning in August 1996, were shot on negative film using an improvised camera mount, processed in a command line program, and presented in QuickTime VR format. They were published as part of The GeoImages Project website, University of California Berkeley.
My privately published Virtual Guidebooks website appeared on-line January 1, 2000, and gradually grew to 8000 panoramas. The site was converted from QTVR to Flash, and eventually converted again to html5. It contained commercial links to Amazon and other vendors.
In September 2011 I undertook a thorough revision of the site, starting with the name. The original 'Virtual Guidebooks' concept made sense early on, when I planned to develop detailed travel guides illustrated with VR panoramas. But this would have required either a staff of researchers and writers, or a partnership with an existing travel guide publisher. Neither of those worked out, and I removed advertising links entirely. I kept on shooting and producing panoramas anyway. The new name, Don Bain's 360° Panoramas, better describes the website's contents and purpose.
In March 2004 I was one of the originators of The World Wide Panorama, a quarterly event promoting 360° panoramic photography that is still active. In June 2007 I helped produce the International VR Photography Conference, held on the University of California Berkeley campus. In April 2010 I organized the conference Tucson 2010 on behalf of the International QTVR Association. In June 2011 I curated two exhibits for the IQTVRA's Palmela 2011 conference. I stopped creating new panoramas after a trip to Baja California in 2020.
The once and future website you see here covers 33 states (also provinces and territories). It will contain about 100 Regions, at least 2900 Localities, and more than 15,000 360° panoramas. It represents a quarter century of work.
My self-assigned task has always been to comprehensively document western North America,, traveling and photographing places I find interesting from the Arctic Ocean to the tip of Baja California, plus the southern tier of states east to Florida, and Hawaii.
The geographic extremes encompassed are Deadhorse in Alaska to the northwest, Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories of Canada to the northeast, Cabo San Lucas in Baja California, Mexico, to the southwest, South Point on the Big Island of Hawai'i even further south, and Key West in Florida to the southeast. Plus a few random places in French Polynesia and Scotland.