Like a walk in the park

Beaming our national parks and icons straight to your computer in 360°.

The Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA) is showcasing three of Australia’s most significant natural-heritage sites and a cultural icon using 360° panorama ‘virtual tours’.

Royal NP and Ku-ring-gai Chase NP are Australia’s oldest national parks — one is the second oldest in the world — but they’re keeping up with the times magnificently on the DEWHA website – displayed beautifully in 360° panoramas. In addition, the 157 year-old Melbourne Cricket Ground, VIC, is featured, as is the Cobourg Peninsula RAMSAR wetlands site, NT – the world's first designated Wetland of International Importance.

It’s a small but appealing selection of some of Australia’s most important sites of natural and historic interest. 

Gazing up through droplets of water that are paused mid-air as you sweep through a 360° view from the rock shelter of National Waterfall in the world’s second oldest national park, one cannot help but marvel at how, in just a few short years, broadband has transformed our lives.

The two national parks featured on the DEWHA website sandwich Sydney to the north and south, so you might also be forgiven for wondering if the digital topography encourages more city-slicker armchair-hiking than traditional bushwalking. But Loic, from Ultimedia in Hobart, who produced the images for DEWHA, disagrees:

“The panoramas were chosen firstly, because of the high level of interactivity they provide and secondly, because some of the locations are not accessible and therefore a 360° panorama is the only way to view them. For example, at National Falls ordinary visitors cannot go under the waterfall, as it’s too dangerous to access.”

DEWHA put up the four panoramas in mid-2008. They work more or less like 'streetview' on Google Maps, but in this case only from static locations and with an emphasis on picture quality rather than wide-spread coverage. For those familiar with the Google Maps vans, the technology is largely the same — the image is made up of pictures taken from different angles and stitched together, and the quality of the picture dictates how close you can zoom-in to get a closer look.

Loic says that he fashioned each panorama from about six high-resolution pictures. He has high hopes that one day there will be more interactivity and visual information about the environment being beamed into your computer.

DEWHA have a few more panoramas in the pipeline, so we’re looking forward to another chance to see a few different views of our bountiful parks, reserves and cultural icons.

Tip: Like a nifty computer game, if you look straight down you can see the image as a puddle on the ground.

See them from a few new angles:
Royal National Park
Ku-ring-gai Chase NP
The Cobourg Peninsular RAMSAR Site
The Melbourne Cricket Ground

See Ultimedia’s other 360° landscape panoramas.