NAVIGATION

 -- Guided Tour --

You can explore the Virtual Tour several ways. The simplest is to start at the first stop of the Guided Tour; once you are ready for the next stop, click your mouse on the "next arrow" image located at the bottom of the page besides the line of dots indicating how far you've traveled in the Guided Tour. You can also navigate by clicking on any of the dots. You can use the location maps links to switch from place to place within the same level.

 -- Panorama Tour --

Rather than following a guide from place to place, the point of the Panorama Tour is to allow you to wander through the house much as you would be able to if you were there in person. Choose a point on the map or from one of the pull-down menus. From there you can start travelling in almost any direction.

IBM Hot Media panoramas

A panorama is a movie that has 360 degree views. It allows you to look up, down, turnaround and zoom in and out. When the panorama is loaded you will see that it has a set of buttons along the bottom. Unlike those for standard movies, these buttons are not the primary means of controlling. With panoramas, you simply drag across the image itself. The buttons supplement this basic action.

The first time that you access a page containing a panorama, the IBM HotMedia applet (172k) will be downloaded once. Most of the panoramas are about 200k in size. Unless you happen to have a fast connection 56.6+, ISDN, T-1, etc. downloading will take a couple minutes (28.8) up to 5 minutes (14.4). When the panorama loads up, the images will fill white background box in the page.

-Looking around in panoramic movies: Press the mouse button and drag across the image in the direction you want to look.

-Zooming in and out: Click on the buttons that look like magnifying glasses (one with a "+", one with a "-").

--Finding and Using Hot Spots

Panoramic objects may have hot spots, areas that when clicked cause some other action to occur. Most frequently a hot spot links to another node (another panorama) but it may also be used to trigger any other action, such as opening a Web page or playing a sound. There are two ways to tell where hot spots are located: Move your pointer around the movie image. When moved over a hot spot, the pointer changes from the classic pointing arrow to pointing hand. Hot spots are highlighted with translucent red rectangles.