We’re at it again.

Breaking new ground in photography and teaming up with Go2Africa to bring you the coolest competition Cape Town has ever seen.

I won’t bore you with the amount of pixels involved this time (to be honest, I’ve simply lost count), lets just say it’s the biggest project we’ve been involved in – and that’s saying something in itself.

If you haven’t seen one of these pictures before, it’s quite easy to enjoy: ZOOM Baby ZOOM. (and click “Full Screen for the best effect)

If you head over to Go2Africa , you can explore this image and two others in a ’scavenger hunt’ competition where the winner will walk a way with the following RIDICULOUS prize  - for two:

• Return flights from a selection of international cities around the world to Cape Town

• 3 Nights’ accommodation at The 12 Apostles Hotel and Spa
• 3 Nights’ accommodation at The One & Only Luxury Resort
• 3 Nights’ accommodation at Franschhoek Country House and Villas

• Car Rental for the full 9 days

• Cape Town guided City Tour
• Cape Point & Peninsula Guided Tour
• Winelands Guided Tour

• VIP Pink Flamingo open-air cinema tickets, Cape Town’s only rooftop cinema

• Meal for 2 at multi-award winning Jardine Restaurant
• Meal for 2 at the classically vintage Boo Radelys Bistro & Bar
• Meal for 2 at one of Cape Town’s premier African cuisine and entertainment venues, Mama Africa Restaurant
• Meal for 2 at meat-lovers paradise, Carne SA

So have a peak at the picture, click on Full Screen and zoom in as far as you like, but head over to Go2Africa to explore the other 2 images we created – one of Camps Bay and one of Franschhoek – and find the hidden logo’s to win.

enjoy!

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With so many sport start being in the news for all the wrong reasons, it’s refreshing to see someone like Bob Skinstad, ex Springbok Rugby captain, using his celebrity status to do some good.

Bob recently locked himself in a make-shift jail cell in the V&A Waterfront in an effort to create awareness and raise funds for the BobsforGood Foundation.

I paid him a visit and created this 360º from the inside of his ‘cell’.

Click and drag the interactive image to get a feel of the space and click on the Full Screen button for a higer quality image.

According to the BobsforGood website, there are 7 million South African school children without shoes. The aim of the Foundation is to provide at least some of these kids the opportunity to own a proper pair to help them get to school.

Not only is it a very practical, down to earth and worthy cause, but it seems Bob and friends have put some thought into making it a sustainable one too.

So how can you get involved?

1. Head over to http://www.bobsforgoodfoundation.org to find out more and make a donation

2. Follow Bob on his site or on Twitter @BobSkinstad to get regular updates

3. Spread the news! (you have friends, don’t you?)

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Today is the 20th aniversary of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.

We celebrate it by sharing this 360º image of his jail cell on Robben Island in the hope that it will remind us all of what was sacrificed for the freedom of a nation.

As Matt Damon depicted in the recent movie ‘Invictus’ – standing in Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island jail cell is a humbling experience.

On this day we celebrate 20 years of freedom of a man who showed the world that forgiveness is possible and practical and beautiful.

All we can do,  is keep on holding him up as an example of what can be done – for each other and our children.

Not a perfect example, because those don’t really exists –  but a truly inspiring imperfect one, which allows each of us to work and hope towards to attain some greatness in our everyday lives.

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2010 has started with a BOOM here at Virtual Africa.

We’re literally flooded with requests to create virtual tours of guest houses, hotels and restaurants and we’ve even been commissioned to create a bunch of Hyper Definition Images (including Johannesburg and Pretoria).

After five years of risking everything and working like mad men, it seems like the world has suddenly put a stamp of approval on our dreams – and it feels GREAT!

To everyone who posted, shared or emailed our Biggest Picture of Cape Town post to friends and family, a big thank you from all of us here at Virtual Africa!

For those interested in the power of social media and anyone who has read “Tipping Point” here are some stats which will explain why we’re so grateful for your help

1. Before we posted our Hyper Definition Image of Cape Town on this site, we received about 300 unique visitors per day.
2. We posted it on our Twitter feed (@Daily_360) and I also mentioned it when I spoke at the African E-Tourism Summit on the 2nd December – but that was the ONLY ‘marketing’ we did.
3. Next thing that happened: it went VIRAL!
4. Since the 2nd of December the image has had 154 000 unique views from 176 countries
5. with people spending an average of 3 minutes looking at the picture and quite a few spending more than an hour!
6. we’ve had 300 of the most amazing complimentary comments – which are always welcome and
7. we’ve been featured in Rapport and Cape Times as well as being interviewed on RSG (radio)

So it is clear that this helps us a great deal – but how does it help you?

Well, the extra business and interests justifies the time spent to create these images (because they are MONSTERS to work with) and that is exactly what we’ve been doing the past month or so.

We are therefore glad, proud and generally stoked to announce:

Virtual Africa, in association with our good friends at Go2Africa, will be launching THREE
Hyper Definition images on the 8th of February.

We have created images of Franschhoek, another one of Cape Town and one of the beautiful Camps Bay.

But that’s not all, we’ve gone a few steps further…..

On the 8th, our Hyper Definition Images will become interactive!

We’ve hidden away hotspots on these images which, if you can find them, will allow you to access virtual tours of venues, restaurants and general places of interest.

The best part though is that you will be able to win some AMAZING prizes by exploring the images and finding the hidden logo’s.

I’m not going to give away all the details now, but let’s just say, if you want to see the inside of the One&Only Resort in Cape Town, a virtual tour is not necessarily your only option……..:)

Okay, that’s enough teasing for now.

Here’s a preview of one of the three Hyper Definition Images we’re going to use in the competition.

We’ve disabled the zoom function for now, but you can get an idea of the detail you’ll be able to explore by clicking on the Virtual Africa icon (near the beach).

All that is left to do, is to subscribe to this site (put your email in the box to the right) or follow us @Daily_360 for updates on the exact time of launch and some tips on where to find the ‘treasures’.

Happy exploring.

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We recently had the privilege to do some virtual tour updates at three of the four Isibindi Africa Lodges.

We’ll share some of the shots via Twitter (@Daily_360) in the weeks to come, but for now, just enjoy the view from the Rhino Post Safari Lodge deck.

Click on the Full Screen button (top right) and then on the video icon – to see  the Ellies do their thing.

Rhino Post Safari Lodge is about 20 km north of Skukuza, in the Kruger National Park and the main attraction (apart from seeing the Big 5, enjoying the tranquility, eating great food …..) is the fact that you can join one of their rangers on a walking safari.

That’s right, you can go on a walk in the Kruger – and trust me, it’s an experience you will never forget.

Even if you don’t encounter King Simba himself, the fact that he might be behind the next bush and that he might not have had lunch yet – really heightens the senses. Really!!

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We have been overwhelmed by the response to our recent Hyper Definition Image of Cape Town and appreciate so many people taking the time to write comments and send us mails.

As a show of our appreciation, we’ve dusted off another Hyper Definition Image we took from Signal Hill earlier this year and converted it to our new (slicker) viewing format.

It’s technically less impressive (2 gigapixels vs the 9 gigapixels of the more recent image), but I still like it more…….even though the stadium wasn’t done yet.

Remember: for the full experience, click on the full screen button (bottom right) and ZOOM !!!

Also, follow us on twitter @Daily_360 for updated on our next Hyper Definition Image – we’re working on another 4!!.

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When you work in the virtual tour business, you have the privilege to witness technological advances almost daily.
But every once in a while these changes combine to create an effect that can only be described as a Game Changer.
Today we are proud to share such an culmination of technological advances.

For a lack of a better word: we’ll call it a Hyper Definition Virtual Tour , but before we get to the technical details, have a look at it:

Virtual Africa presents: The highest definition picture ever taken of Cape Town.

It might not look like much on first glance, but try the following and be ready to be blown away: click on the full screen button (bottom right) and then ZOOM !!

Some details as to the size of this image:

• It was created by stitching 1850,fully zoomed (x 20 optical zoom), 10 MegaPixel images together.
• The time it took from the first shot (top left) and last shot (lower right) being taken, was about 3 hours.
• It’s 205 000 pixels wide.
• That equates to a printout of about 90 m x 15 m!
• The end result was a 25 GigaBytes RAW file which takes about an hour to open on my Macbook Pro.

Despite the size of the image, you can view it here because of a method called ’tiling’.

It works exactly the same way as mapping platforms such as Google Maps.

for example: When you view the whole of South Africa in Google Maps, the image obviously does not contain the high detail imagery of every roof top in the country. It’s only when you start zooming in, that Google Maps loads the relevant information.

The same happens here. We’ve taken our very big picture and created hundreds of thousand lower definition pictures (or tiles) from it. As you zoom into the picture, the only the appropriate tiles are loaded and this allows you to explore a very large image on a relatively slow internet connection. Simple, but smart.

In the coming months we hope to use images like these to organize data, visually.

Once again, similar to Google Maps, we can overlay information on top of this image to further enhance your exploration of Cape Town and the good news is that we are currently working on a few projects which will allow us to do just that.

In the mean time, we would love to hear your suggestions as to what we should call this kind of image/virtual tour…..

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