The product of eleven years of hiking, exploring, and VR photography, VirtualParks.org is a successful proof of concept that showed high quality panoramas could excite people about our wild places. Since 1995, millions of people have visited this site and gotten a glimpse of what it's like to visit incredible wilderness locales such as Kings Canyon, Crater Lake, Yosemite, Banff, Zion, Arches, Big Basin, Mono Lake and hundreds of other parks & preserves.
Yet VirtualParks has always been funded on a shoestring. To cover many more great natural places, help is needed. If you know of someone at, or work for an organization which would be interested in sponsoring this site and/or expanded panoramic coverage of North Americas's parks and wilderness areas, please have them contact VirtualParks.
There are many applications for these panoramas of nature:
- One of the highest purposes of photographic virtual reality is to enable people who may not otherwise be able to visit wilderness locations due to a physical challenge, to virtually explore nature.
- Virtual Reality has been demonstrated to reduce the perception of pain in patients undergoing various treatments. What better environment to escape to than to a pristine mountain lake?
- Photographic panoramas provide an unparalleled documentary archive of a specific place at a particular moment in time. Imagine how valuable it would be if you could pan around the the last Sierra glaciers before they melted, or see a great forest before it was ruined by insect blight or a fire.
- Reduce unnecessary trips & wasted time -- travellers can check out a location before expending the time, money, and gas to get there.
- Education - high quality panoramic photography shows a much more complete picture of a place than a single photo. Any organization that wants to show the nature of the land should be looking at using panoramas.
- Reliving memories - thousands of people have written saying one or more panoramas here reminded them of a special moment they had at that location.
- Interactive - being able to pan around, move between VRs or link to other content drives interest by providing an exploration experience instead of a passive viewing experience.
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You can view VirtualParks.org panoramas many ways: |
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Use maps to drill down
to a park you want to view scenes of |
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Scenes with a common theme
i.e. All Lakes, All Mountain Passes, etc. |
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A gallery of the best scenes
A showcase of the 100 best panoramas on the site |
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Panoramas listed alphabetically
Look at all scenes whose names start with A, B, C, etc. |
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Narratives of the trips
The story of how the scenes were shot |
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Most recently added panoramas
Sorted by time |
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High-res FullScreen panoramas
for a more immersive experience |
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