How & Why?
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is carrying out a vegetion survey of the Soqotra Archipelago. As part of that survey it is making a photographic record of key sites. This photographic record takes the form of Virtual Reality Panoramas. The panoramas are made by taking a series of 12 overlapping photographs using a wide angle lens and merging them into a seamless image on a computer. Inorder to do this correctly (i.e. rotate the camera about the rear nodal point of the lens on a truely perpendicular axis) a lightweight rig was developed.

When combined with a more conventional assessment of vegetation and an accurate GPS reading the panoramas will form a valuable resource for descriptive vegetation classification, interpretation of remote sensing data and assessment of changes through time.

What is presented here is still very much work in progress. A total of 50 panoramas were taken during the January - March 1999 expedition and the photographs are now being stitched into full panoramas. As each panorama is produced it will be added directly to the web site and so the list presented on the next few pages should grow at the rate of about two panoramas a week.

The images on the WWW are less than one third the resolution of the original stitched images. The higher resolution images will be made available on CD-ROM at the end of the project. Given sufficient computing power images ten times the resolution of those here could be created from the same negative.

Viewing Inorder to view the panoramas you must be using a Java enabled web browsers. If you have Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator version 4 or later the panoramas should work fine and they will probably work OK on version 3 of these browsers. Go to one of the panoramas from the index page and see if you get a rotating image. If you don't you will have to upgrade you browser or download the Java Plugin from Sun in order to see them.

Once you can see the panorama rotating on your screen you can manipulate it by dragging your mouse across the image to go from side to side or up and down or you can press the 'A' key to zoom in and the 'Z' key to zoom out.

Clicking on the 'Zoom' icon gives access to a series of tools.