My survey of the top ten ‘Virtual Tourist Destinations’. All ten are free and work on Windows:
1. Whitehart Island, Washington State hunting wilderness. (3D open world, game-engine)…
2. The Painted Caves of Lascaux. (Psuedo-3D Flash tour)…
3. Bejing’s Virtual Forbidden City, a faithful recreation of the city in the Qing dynasty era. (3D world, game-engine)…
4. Disney World (Florida). (Google Earth 3D)…
5. Ancient Rome, exactly as it was laid out in the year 320 A.D. (Google Earth 3D)…
6. A tour of Rick’s Potting Shed. Ok it’s not exactly Buckingham Palace, but it’s cool. (Microsoft Photosynth)…
7. Pattaya, Thailand — condom-buying capital of the world…
8. A tour of your friends’ front yards. (Google Street View)…
9. The Palace of Westminster and Big Ben (Quicktime + HTML)…
10. Arden, two well-funded but flawed academic attempts to authentically recreate the world of Shakespeare’s England using a game-engine. Both are free, but are conversions (“mods”) for the commercial game Neverwinter Nights (about £2 inc. postage from Amazon UK).
Interesting but so-far untested: Free-roaming in Fuel (2009). (Review)
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