[whatwg] Proposal for HTML5: Virtual Tours

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 9:14 AM, Jesús Ruiz García
<jesusruiz2007 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello again to all the group whatwg.
>
> I have a second proposal, which like the first, I do not know if it can be
> useful for inclusion in HTML5.
>
> This time, I want to speak to you of the virtual tours, used by museums,
> clinics, libraries, hotels and a long list of websites.
>
> So far, all the more powerful virtual tours I've seen, are made in Flash.
> Usually, these tours are created with the following applications:
> *Easypano Virtual Tour Software*, *3DVista*, *Flashificator*, *Autopano Tour
> * and some others.
>
> An example of Easypano virtual tour:
> http://www.vitaldent.com/nuestras_clinicas.jsp
>
> Other examples using 3DVista:
> http://www.3dvista.com/virtual-tours-samples.htm
>
> I've been reviewing whether some library is being developed to support the
> creation of these applications on HTML5. I found a project called
> Pannellum, which uses WebGL:
> http://www.mpetroff.net/archives/2012/05/28/introducing-pannellum/
> For now though it works properly on Chrome, but isn't powerful or
> beautiful, as are the tours developed with Flash applications.
>
> My proposal is to give more support to this type of works. We could create
> a new tag called "tour" or something similar. If video and audio have own
> tag, also a tour could be differentiated from the other elements of the
> website.

This seems to be doable in WebGL just fine.  If current WebGL-based
tour things aren't as pretty as the Flash ones, that's just a matter
of the current stuff not being worked on as much - there's nothing
inherent about WebGL that would make it uglier than the Flash version.

This is not a very useful thing to add to HTML itself.  "Tours" like
this are not common, and they would be very difficult to describe in
markup.  They are best suited for a specialized JS library.

~TJ