Mission Statement

In my youth, I traveled a great deal. I have easily flown 750,000+ miles in my short life, mostly before becoming an adult. Now, the benefits of travel (novelty, cultural exposure, and the chance for exploration) turn out to have considerable costs. Plane tickets cost serious money. Hotels, too. Travel devours vacation time, something I earn much more slowly in my professional life than money.

But I remain a tourist.

Places exist that lie on no earthly map. My lifetime has seen the birth of an art form unavailable to any generation prior: world building. True, the written word has long had the power to describe, but words set down rails that guide the reader through the worlds they describe. Reading a novel comes about as close to "exploration" as being strapped into a ride at a theme park: you see only what the author lays in front of you.

World building, then, is not used here to mean the development of a rich and detail setting. Instead, it refers to the nuts and bolts of assembling tiny worlds that have no physical existence, and using an interface (such as a computer) to explore those worlds. I am a tourist in virtual worlds, whose existence, though pale shadows of reality in depth and breadth, nevertheless have lives of their own.

Recently, I discovered Autostitch, an elegant piece of software that combined the fields of vision algorithms and photo editing to create 360-degree panoramas. I realized that this software could allow me to convey more clearly the experience of immersion that I seek in my virtual tourism. By capturing these iconic scenes, and providing the commentary necessary to give them context, I could maintain a photographic travel log, revisiting the most striking places in my experience and explaining what makes them stand apart.

I want to share these worlds with you.