Perfect for Agoraphobics: POVNYC

If you're like us, you love the city, but hate leaving your apartment. And let's be honest, in this day of bird flu, dirty bombs, and Christmas tourist crowds, isn't it better to just stay inside for the next sixty days or so? And now you don't even have to give up seeing all your favorite NYC sights-- you can experience them in full clickable, dragable action at NYCPOV, which literally has dozens of 3D panoramic shots. Be sure to check out the map navigation-- you can see many of the shots are clustered in midtown. Only one complaint: none of the shots come from the four outer boroughs! Does anyone have any Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, or Staten Island Quicktime VR?

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By Jake Dobkin in News on December 13, 2005 4:33 PM

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Gary

Does this mean I never have to visit New York City again? Just turn on my computer, and bam there you have it. Wow you won't be the only ones staying home. Bird Flu aside, with all the tourists gone, it might be bearable for you'll to step out side again and breathe the fresh air.

Brightliner

Basically just re-presents old panoramas from Jim Galvin. I miss DizzyCity. That site was short-lived and used iPix technology, which is inferior to Quicktime, but it covered a ton of intersections. Lucky for me, I downloaded all the iPix panoramas there that I was interested in before they went out of business.

There are only a few panos of Brooklyn that I've been able to find. One of the Williamsburg piers and a partial of Grand Army Plaza. There are a few more lo-res QTVR panos at WNET's A Walk Around Brooklyn website.

A German site, I think it was studionine.de, used to have good hi-res cylindrical panos of the Coney Island boardwalk and from the interior and exterior observation decks of the World Trade Center, but those are gone. Apple's QTVR gallery has a couple of older but beautiful cubic panos. The Grand Central one is especially spectacular.

For higher resolution QTVR panoramas today, go to panoramas.dk. They've got quite a few NYC panos in their archives. Jook Leung is a frequent contributor. He's made panos (with sound) of Times Square on New Years Eve for the past three years. It's almost like being there but without having to stand in the middle of a noisy crowd in the cold for hours with no bathroom and not much of a view.