About the House of Representatives panoramas

Using the panoramas

A grid will appear while the panorama movies download. Once this disappears the movie has downloaded and, with the mouse pointer inside the image, click and drag to explore. Most of the panoramas provide a 360 degree view, so you can look up and down as well as from side to side.

Click on the arrrow with question mark to see hotspot links which will either take you to another panorama or a related subject page in the website, or will simply provide information about what you are looking at. Some of the panoramas of rooms inside Parliament Buildings link with other rooms in the complex; such links do not necessarily reflect the actual layout of Parliament Buildings. Information about the hotspot is provided in text in the bottom grey bar of the panorama viewer as you hold your mouse over it.

The panoramas are all between 300-800k in size and will take 1-2 minutes to download on a good 56k dial-up connection.

About the panoramas

The QuickTime VR panoramas were created by photographer Brian Donovan of the Centre for Flexible and Distance Learning at the University of Auckland in association with Robert Boyd-Bell from e-net limited.

The 360 x 180-degree images were made by combining data captured from a rotational slit-scan film camera with that from a digital camera with a fisheye lens. Donovan developed the technology on various international projects. These include the documentation of a block of ancient Roman houses at Pompeii for the British School at Rome (in collaboration with Auckland University's Department of Classics and Ancient History), the Herculaneum Conservation Project and coverage of the Byzantine monastery of Hilandar at Mount Athos in Greece for the University's Architecture Department.

e-net limited is a digital production company that specialises in education and professional development projects, most recently the innovative Transit of Venus website in association with the Royal Society of NZ, the University of Auckland and other institutions. The site attracted more than 2 million hits in six months.

Inquiries about the use of the parliamentary panoramas and all images from the Parliamentary Service collection should be made to .