Hint hint: Hey Google Maps Team! Why don’t you guys use this for implemnting Google Street View in the iPhone Safari browser? :-P

I had one of those weekends when you need to try and do something new. So I finally went ahead and created what I wanted for a long time. Virtual Tour Viewer for iPhone. Version 0.1

Index page of the Virtual Tour

You can see it live by pointing your iPhone to this url:

Virtual Tour Viewer for iPhone:
http://bit.ly/6HEqD

Update Feb 1, 2010: Since I no longer update and improve the code I modified the application that now it uses a newer iphone panorama viewer from the 360cities.net website, which was developed based on my code.

Update March, 2012: I’ve migrated my blog to tumblr and cannot host the code on this blog anymore so the bit.ly link doesn’t work. I recommend you checking out the krpano viewer, which has now evolved in a very robust iphone viewer. We’ve also replaced the original iphone viewer on 360cities.net with it.

Please let me know what you think of it using comments below this article or by emailing me at jan dot vrsinsky at gmail d o t c om.

The app probably works only on iPhone and it has been tested only with my iPhone 3G. Any feedback and bug reports are appreciated.

I also want to thank waine a. lee and to Ryan Scherf, the author of jSwipe, for being an inspiration for me to write this (although they didn’t know ;-)).

Read on: Goals, Roadmap, Technologies are below.

Goals:

I created this project just for fun, however the real-world use cases are being able to present a virtual tour of a restaurant, hotel or any other kind of real estate using iPhone. Virtual Tour Viewer for iPhone can work as a standalone application (the tour is only on iPhone) or as a counterpart of it’s destop rich-media variant to target iPhone audience when they are travelling for example.

Roadmap:

I’d like to create a jQuery plugin from this so others can use it easily. Then add a lot of features needed for in a mature virtual tour product. Such as loading the tour data from a web service, adding hotspots for moving from one panorama to another, external links, image pop-ups, etc. We’ll see.

Technologies used:

jQuery, webkit 3d css transformations, PtGui, Google Maps Static API, iPhone ;-)

Panoramic images used in the example:

All images are © Copyright 2009 Jan Vrsinsky. Please let me know if you want to use them – jan dot vrsinsky at gmail d o t c om.