Virtual tour of Lothlorien

The Java applet below allows you to take a virtual walk through a series of photographs taken around the house and gardens of Lothlorien therapeutic community. While the applet finishes loading, please look through these brief instructions on how to use it.

Interface outline

In the applet window, you will see:

• On the top left, a large picture, which is your current view from the place you are standing. You can see different views by using the tour controller (described below), to turn around and move to different places around the house and gardens.
• Along the bottom, a comment box which describes the picture and gives you hints for navigation.
• On the right hand side, a green and orange object which is the tour controller. You use this to turn around and look different ways, and to move from one point to another on the tour.
• Below that, a button marked 'low-res', which switches to using poorer quality but faster loading pictures.
• On the top right, a smaller picture is sometimes displayed to let you see the view in a particular direction without having to wait for the large picture to load.

Using the controller

The controller has a central ring with up to eight handles sticking out of it along the points of the compass. These represent the different directions you can look and move from your current view.

The top one is pointed - you click this to move forward from one place to another.

All the others are rounded - these are used to turn to face a different direction without moving. For example, clicking the handle on the west side will turn you 90 degrees to the left, the south-west one will turn you to look over your left shoulder, and the south one will turn you to face backwards. Note that these are all relative to the direction you are currently looking.

The colors on the handles indicate whether you can walk in that direction or just look - an orange circle or ring means you can walk; blue means you can just look. If you can't look or walk in a direction, that handle will be hidden.

So, in the example above, you can move forwards and turn to the left, right, behind or behind-to-the-left. If you turn left or behind, you will be able to move in those directions (orange spot), but you can only look in the other directions (blue spot).

Finally, you can get a quick preview of the view in a given direction by just holding the mouse over one of the handles without clicking it - a small image will appear on the top right of the applet window. You may need to wait a few seconds for this to load.

The central circle is normally orange coloured, but turns blue when you have clicked on a handle and are waiting for the new image to load - this shows you that your mouse-click has been recognised. Note that you need to be careful not to move the mouse while you click it, or the mouse-click will not be recognised. Also, be careful not to click a handle more than once, as the clicks are queued up and you will end up turning or moving further than you meant to.

The low resolution button

Because the main images may take some time to load over a modem connection, there is a facility to use lower resolution images. These will look a bit fuzzy, but load much quicker. To turn this on, click the low-res button; the ring on the left end of it will turn orange to show that you are using low res pictures. You can then continue your tour using low resolution images. If you get to a view that you would like to see more clearly, click the low res button again to switch to high resolution mode, and a high resolution image will be loaded for the current view. You can then either continue the tour in high resolution mode, or click the button again to switch back to low resolution mode.

Credits

The tour guide program was designed by Andrew Baxter, who also took the photographs for the tour. You are welcome to use the code on your own website. Thanks to John Mallon for help with the words.

Now scroll down to see the tour applet itself - have fun!