This section of Delta Works.Org Virtual Tour has the latest news about the project. The project will go through several cycles of improvement which will be reported here. Stay tuned for new virtual tours as well as updates of the ones already active.

14 October 2008 - V1 Beta Launch 

Finally, after close to 1.5 years of development and planning we are confident that the results of our work are of high enough quality to show it to the press. The Virtual Tour project will be the first of 5 projects to launch under Deltawerken Online V3. 

13 October 2008 - Final Tweaks, Layout, and Texts.

Today we will finish up the the last few remaining issue to be able to send out a press release to several media. The launch is still set at Thursday 30th of October.

12 October 2008 - New Viewer build

Because the embedded viewer wasn't compatible with the CMS on Deltawerken Online we had to build a new popup-viewer. Good thing is that it allows more space to be used. We might transform it into a layer, but this might take some additional tweaking of the website.

10 October 2008 - Promotional pictures posted on the project website 

On the left side an additional button has been added "Press-Kit Photos" which give a preview of all the photos that the press will be entitled to use as long as they do a special on our DeltaWorks Virtual Tour Project. 

6 October 2008 - Widget screenshots, Video's Online

Two additional pages have been added to the website. It is now possible to see the video's online as well as some preliminary screen shots of the eventual widget. 

2 October 2008 - Higher quality, Flash viewer complete

The past 2 weeks we went back to stitch all photos at tiff format, enhancing the quality and making it unnecessary to ever go back to the originals for any future alterations. Through file name-coding it has become very clear now which version, originals etc. are used which makes quality upgrades in the future a piece of cake! 

A viewer of the virtual tours has been completed and it will be distributed in Flash format. This way a large portion of internet users can view our virtual tours; thus supporting our aim to make it accessible to as many as possible. 

A 'widget' is being made making it possible for blogs, newsgroups, and other websites to embed a small version of the Maeslantbarrier Virtual Tour in their website. 

Video-output files and demo's made earlier this year will be added to YouTube and feature as demonstration on this website shortly. 

13 September 2008 - Haringvliet Done, Maeslant & Oosterschelde nearly complete

The photos of the different dams and barriers are being stitched as we speak! Some are already done, some are getting a final check. Soon they will be added to the tourweaver making them into one tour.

7 September 2008 - Back to scratch

Most of the photos have been JPG-prestitched to see how easy their eventual stitch would be. Thanks to a new conversion trick we now can convert our images from RAW to TIFF after which they are stitched as TIFFs. This yields a very high resolution with higher quality of colours. In short it makes it far more easy for the program to find the same paterns and thus stitching them automatically way easier. It does mean going back to scratch to ramp up quality to the highest possible once and for all.

6 Septermber 2008 - First 5 Virtual Tours to come online around 5-10 Oktober 2008

Currently the stitching works are for some virtual tours already finished. The tour itself is currently being build in Tourweaver. We expect the first 5, including kite-shots, to go online around  5 - 10 Oktober. A demonstration page will be given to the media to see what we are currently building. We hope to partner with several online and offline media.

5 September 2008 - Tourweaver 4: Choice for Flash

The new project will make use of Flash rather then Java. This due to the fact that more people have Flash installed then Java as well as the fact that it will be far more easy to embed in the website of others.

3 September 2008 - Extra Bandwidth needed

To cope with a storm surge of visitors we plan on renting additional server space for 1-3 months to cope with the increase in bandwidth. We will allow not only people to publish links but also to embed the virtual tours in their blog or website.