If you’ve always wanted to visit Nepal but never got on the plane for some reason, here’s a way to visit one of the most beautiful places on earth – virtually in 3D.
A Singapore company has come up with an online tour, called 3rd Planet, that takes a user on a visit to places like Nepal’s Patan Durbar Square. Here, you can get a virtual fly-through or walk-through in a high-resolution 3D world complete with temples and other places of interest like in a game.
There are sights and sounds of crowds – recorded from the place itself – which come alive once you visit the website with your Web browser.
That’s right, you don’t need to install any application, other than a browser plug-in, which admittedly takes a bit of time to download and which, fortunately, only needs to be downloaded once.
Like a tourist guide, 3rd Planet offers virtual travellers snippets of information and pictures of the place itself. Right now in beta stage, it offers only the brief tour in Nepal and other snippets of data on other places on the planet, like Singapore and India, for example.
To be sure, what the company is doing here is not all new. Microsoft, for example, offered photographic fly-throughs for several cities in the past, while Google Streetview now lets you explore neighbourhoods as if you were walking through a street.
The main difference is that 3rd Planet comes with interactive sights and sounds. For example, the birds really “fly” in the sky, as opposed to a static photo in Google Streetview.
Why not try it yourself by heading to www.3rdplanet.com
