Visit the world’s greatest landmarks without going anywhere
Want to travel the world and ‘find yourself’ but don’t actually want to have to get your hands dirty? Worry not, for now you can visit a selection of the world’s most beautiful locations all from the comfort of your favourite coffee shop.
AirPano is billed as the world’s largest resource of high quality 360 degree panoramas. Taken from a birds eye view, there are over 50 scenes featuring famous landmarks and wonders of the natural world to explore. With views like these, those birds must be having a ball up there.
The Big Apple in your pocket
This travel app isn’t just a collection of high definition photos. Each one allows you to spin a full 360 degrees from your fixed position among the clouds. There are a number of albums to explore including ‘Beautiful cities’, ‘Over the mountains’, ‘Historical places’ and more. To achieve the dazzling floating effect the AirPano team used a whole variety of platforms including helicopters, light jets, hot air balloons and even airships.
With each image you have a small amount of zoom to play with, but it’s almost as if the developers couldn’t bear you to view their pictures in anything less than glorious HD as this is quite limited. If you stop spinning around for a second, you realize that almost anywhere you land would be worthy of framing as a picture in its own right. The way the panoramas are captured actually makes you feel that you are within a 3D space rather than just spinning an image around you like with the built-in panorama photo tool in iOS.
You also get the option to turn on ‘gyro’ which uses the accelerometer in your phone to allow you to move around the landscape which is a nice touch if you like alienating everyone else in the room swinging your arms around like a madman. You can also call up an information panel which gives you a background to the location and a couple of facts as well as showing an interactive map if your geography isn’t up to scratch.
Airpano Travel Book is a joy to browse. To navigate your way through the glorious scenes you flick through an animated pop-up book that displays great little animations of each chapter.
Almost any frame is a beautiful picture in its own right
This app is the equivalent of a effortlessly cool coffee table book. Perfect to pick up, explore and experience the sensation of vertigo from the comfort of your own home. There really isn’t anything out there that matches it in terms of photographic quality. Though it would be nice to see the chapters of the travel book grow and perhaps inherit some of the more advanced features of it’s desktop big brother.
Menu animations are a nice lovely touch
Price: $3.99 / £2.49
Size: 201 MB
Version: 2.0
Developer: CONCEPT360 GmbH
