IT and Culture: Virtual tours around the Catherine Palace offered to iPad users

This August the State Museum-Preserve “Tsarskoe Selo” jointly with “Classic” Studio has launched a project that offers users of Apple mobile devices take a virtual tour to the Catherine Palace.

Right now the app is available to iPad users. Similar apps for more devices will follow in the near future.

The tour will take users to all halls of the Grand Tsarskoe Selo (Catherine) Palace, including its famous enfilade and Amber Room. The 3D hall reconstruction bases upon spherical panorama technology which enables to show more realistically the unique beauty of Palace interiors. A convenient, user-friendly interface and visual maps-schemes make it easy to orient oneself around the palace and visit specific halls one takes an interest in.

Each hall is accompanied by detailed description; separately go photos of the most interesting details and interiors.

The particular feature of this app is its ability to run off-line. Once downloaded on the mobile device the virtual tour will be available at any time regardless of Internet connectivity. Specially for this project the “Classic” Studio has worked out an original software that allows to create virtual tours using spherical panoramas offline on Apple mobile devices.

So far there are apps in Russian and English. The short-term plans include translation of its text information into five more languages. The tour itself will grow to include numerous monuments of architectural heritage located in parks of the museum-preserve.