VRWAY Communication Use REALVIZ Stitcher 4.0 For Their Stunning Series of City Tours With A Difference

Sophia Antipolis, France (February 15, 2005) - AROUNDER, the online travel magazine, that features a unique world-class city in 360-degree fullscreen panoramas with each issue, will be rolling out 65 new cities in 2005 using REALVIZ Stitcher 4.0. Prior issues covering Milan, Lugano, Barcelona, Monaco, Rome, Cologne, Parma and Zermatt all used Stitcher 4.0 in the production of hundreds of panoramas.

REALVIZ Stitcher has proved a key tool for webidentity dot com, VRWAYCommunication's R&D company, in bringing the panoramic experience to travelers around the world. REALVIZ Stitcher is a professional-level application, used by thousands of professional photographers, architects, multimedia and 3D artists worldwide, and enables the creation of high-quality panoramas for the Web, film, print, and 3D.

AROUNDER gives travelers a vivid sense of what a city has to offer: historical cathedrals and works of art, museums featuring famous artists, local cafes and stores, breathtaking mountain-top views, quiet parks and gardens. Each issue contains a series of panoramas in a selection of formats - QuickTime Full Screen, QuickTime Medium and Java - so that both dial-up and high-speed Internet users can participate. Navigation is easy with Zoomify Flash maps of the city and surrounding area. Every issue also links to local merchants with virtual tours of hotels, restaurants, spas and stores.

The nucleus of the AROUNDER concept is the virtual tour - fullscreen 360-degree photographic panoramas, which enable the user to pan left, right, up and down - a far superior format than the standard photograph as it gives the viewer a real sense of actually 'being there'. Users can click on hotspots within each panorama to move on to another pano, and thus take a virtual tour. Each panorama within the series highlights a historic point of interest within that city - such as cathedrals or old town squares, and places where a tourist would visit if physically in that city - museums, parks, local marketplaces and seaside promenades.

"All of the stitching for the AROUNDER project, both city and monuments coverage as well as customer site VRs was created using REALVIZ Stitcher 4.0." explains Marco Trezzini, Founder VRWAY International and AROUNDER.com."It's an essential part of our workflow. We really couldn't accomplish the work we do within the sometimes almost impossible time constraints and with the level of quality we want to achieve with any other stitching product on the market.

"Since we launched AROUNDER.com last year, the response has been absolutely incredible. Travel companies, tourist offices and luxury hotel chains are just the first to recognize the stand-out quality of our work and the huge benefits of this concept. Copenhagen, Florence, Paris, Düsseldorf, Venice, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Geneva, Brussels, Budapest and Moscow are just some of the new cities, which are due to launch over the coming months, so we have a very healthy level of work at the moment, to say the least! Of course, this just means that we need to be able to rely even more heavily on the production tools we use in order to be able to meet our deadlines and the high expectations of clients, and REALVIZ Stitcher is a real life saver in this respect."

To take the full tour go to: www.arounder.com