Actual Education Interactive Guided Tours

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

-8 great reasons to use a virtual tour-
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sit back and enjoy a visual extravaganza!

Almost all of our virtual tours let you view each location in 'full screen'. A simple double click of your mouse takes the panoramic image and makes it fill your computer screen, giving you a truly immersive experience! If you can't be there in person, we think this is the next best option!

You don't just watch...you participate!

Get bored by dvds? You sit passively watching what the director wants you to see. With our tours that's all very different. Want to look up, down, left or right? With our tours you can! You can even zoom in on things that interest you!

__________________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________________

Experience 'deja vu' - Interactive Guided Tour style!

All but one of our virtual tours follow a pathway which tells a story or takes you on a virtual walk around a location. Let's take the 'Edinburgh's History - The Old Town Interactive Guided Tour' as an example. This has been split into six mini-tours which take you on a comprehensive journey around Edinburgh. We've designed this so that you could arrive in Edinburgh for the first time but easily do this tour, for real, without the need of a map! This tour lets you see where you are, where you have just been and where you will go to next.

Feel like you've been there hundreds of years before!

Why settle for discovering what is there today? Many of our Interactive Guided Tours feature clickable 'hotspots' which bring up archive images so you can see what the area used to look like. This means you could visit somewhere you have never set foot in, yet which you could describe how it once looked!

Could this be 'historical deja vu'? Quite possibly!

__________________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________________

It's amazing what you can do with your mouse...

Some of our tours come with clickable hotspots which bring up video clips and rotatable 'models'. These models are carefully constructed photographs which let you rotate a historical object, as if you could move it with your own hands!

This isn't just a 'virtual tour'!

Most computer 'virtual tours' are simple panoramic images with little or no accompanying information. Our tours feature informative and interesting text and almost all of our tours come with audio voice-over, for a real 'multimedia' experience.

__________________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________________

What if the unthinkable happens...

...and you don't like the information in our text and voice-overs? No problem! Because our tours use photographs, rather than computer reconstructions, you can use your own guidebooks or history texts instead. Let's say you are looking at one of the scenes from the Edinburgh's historic West Bow, you can Google 'West Bow' or thumb through any books on Edinburgh and read all about this place. Turn the sound off, double click the 'virtual tour' scene and "hey presto" you can explore the scene with someone else's information! Many of our tours offer lots of scenes where this would be possible!

We promise not to sulk...

Dear old Great Aunt Henrietta can come on holiday too!

Well, not really, but if you've visited somewhere (for real) and if we've got it covered in an Interactive Guided Tour, then you can show Henrietta all the places you went to which feature on the tour. You can even legally let her install your download (or CD-Rom) file! She might not have made the vacation with you, but now she can see some of the historic places you visited.

__________________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________________