XPLORE Technical Information
By Don Irving ([email protected])

For many years I have been fascinated by computer tools for exploring real places in the world. One such tool that intrigued me used to reside at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. You would sit in front of a large TV screen that showed photos of San Francisco taken from a low-flying airplane. You could sequence the photos with a joystick and fly anywhere you wanted in the city just as if you had your own plane. I love that sort of thing, and the Web is ideally suited for making this concept come to life world-wide. It was this experience that motivated me to begin thinking about something like XPLORE.
XPLORE is a CGI program which I wrote in perl as a handy way to learn the perl language. It examines the information present in the URLs that call it to learn which XPLORE tour, location, and view direction to build. Then it calculates which views you would see from there, whether any of them are at boundaries, and which next locations are possible. Finally XPLORE builds references to the image files which are organized into directories at our site, and it outputs the page for you to see. When you click an image you send XPLORE a new URL, and it performs the whole thing again to move you to the next location. It's pretty cool if I don't mind saying so myself.
XPLORE uses proposed HTML 3.0 features. Up until a few months ago, the only browser that was able to show these properly was Netscape (1.1 or greater). By now most newer web browsers are able to properly display HTML 3.0 features. If you are using an older web browser that does not support HTML 3.0, XPLORE will not work.
I have no present plan to use XPLORE commercially. For now it's just a fun, new toy at my Web site for you to enjoy. I do not preclude, however, the possibility of changing this at some future date if people were to start asking me to do scenarios for them.

All of XPLORE is protected by Copyright © 1995,1996 Donald J. Irving, All Rights Reserved.

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