Translating bumblebee dialect…
Web-based Virtual Tour has become a desirable and demanded application, yet challenging due to the nature of web application's running environment such as limited bandwidth and no guarantee of high computation power on the client side. Image-based rendering approach has attractive advantages over traditional 3D rendering approach in such Web Applications. Traditional geometry-based approach, such as VRML, requires labor-intensive 3D modeling process, high bandwidth and computation power especially for photo-realistic virtual scenes. QuickTime VR and IPIX as examples of image-based approach, use panoramic photos and the virtual scenes that can be generated from photos directly skipping the modeling process. But, QuickTime VR and IPIX may not only require special cameras or effort to take panoramic views but also provide only one fixed-point navigation (look-around and zooming in-out) rather than "walk around", that is a very important feature to provide immersive experience to virtual tourists. Easy and Effective Virtual Tour constructs virtual tour using several snap shots of conventional photos without special tools, build simple 3D space within each photo using spidery mesh, and expand the virtual spaces by connecting each other using simple user intervention to specify correspondence. The expanded virtual space provides virtual tourists with free navigation and immersive experience of walking around through the WWW.