Virtual 3D Santa Cruz Images [1]
Virtual Tours
A virtual tour is a interactive representation of a physical space where you are able to freely navigate and explore the space. When most people think about the term "virtual tour", the first thing that might come to mind is a residential application. For example, when you want to take a virtual tour of a house that you're considering purchasing. But there are also much more large scale applications that are possible.
Virtual tours are especially relevant to the field of interactive 3D. They are all about spatial relations. For example, you could have a virtual airport, warehouse or office complex. These are the sorts of complex environments that are hard to get a feel for from a series of 2D drawings or illustrations.
Let's take for example a new office complex. Let's say you're going to build a $25 million office complex which will include a number of buildings as well as a large amount of park-like open space. Because of the cost involved, you really want to be able to experience the space before building it. You want to be able to move around and see it from every angle and not just from predetermined angles a designer or vendor has selected which may look especially good. The nice thing about a virtual tour is that you can fully experience the space and workout any shortcomings in the virtual space rather than waiting to identify them and work them out in a real space. Obviously there's a huge cost advantage to working out kinks in a virtual mock-up.
References
[1] http://garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=713