The HDView team released a gem of a sample app this week from ICE that amongst other things provide a solution for showing 360 degree panoramas. The solution uses three MSI controls to provide a seamless panning experience.
Now what could be a bigger 360 panorama then the Earth itself?
Live Sample: http://deepzoom.soulclients.com/map360/
Straight away the benefits become clear:
- We can centre the map anywhere on the World. (I can hear New Zealand cheering from here).
- We can show flight paths and shipping routes across the Pacific Ocean
- We can provide a smooth zooming experience from the world level without be shunted over to Africa.
The example is running with the tiles from the awesome open source project OpenStreetMap, I highly recommend you take a look at what they are doing to provide a free set of world data, updated by people like you.
Download the code for the example above from here:
http://deepzoom.soulclients.com/map360/map360example.zip