The "HALIEN Tours CD"

After many requests from visitors to HALIEN Virtual Tours a version of the site is now being made available on CD-R. What's On the CD The CD incorporates the latest version of the HALIEN Virtual Tours site (covering Torbay and various other nearby areas). Unconstrained by the space and download time considerations of the internet, the CD Virtual tour features much clearer versions of all the well over 2000 images from around 250 viewing spots around Torbay, Dartmouth and Exeter. Price and Ordering details .. for the United Kingdom Please note that availability is limited to mailing addresses within the United Kingdom. What does the CD offer over the web site? The virtual tours of Torquay, Paignton, Brixham and Cockington (plus other areas) incorporate over 2000 digital photographs, each of at least VGA (640 by 480) resolution. Even in their compressed form these images each take several seconds to download via the internet. To visit and view all of the spots within the on-line tours would take many hours (and, for those of us who don't yet have free local calls, cost a considerable amount in connection charges even at the cheapest rates)! Images are loaded off the CD many times faster and give a much more responsive feel (it can be rather like 'flying' along the tour!). In order to keep the image download time reasonable all of the images on the internet virtual tour have been compressed down to less than half of their original size. Inevitably, this causes a loss of quality in the compressed images compared to the originals. This effect is particularly noticeable in, for example, views that show the sea or sky - which tend to look rather 'blocky' in these areas. The images on the CD are only lightly compressed and barely show any of these artefacts. See a comparison of the CD and internet versions of a typical tour view. The current version of the tour already occupies over well 50Mb of "web-space". In order to keep within this limit some spots have been omitted from the internet version. All spots are included on the CD. System requirements for using the CD The structure of the HALIEN CD is basically the same as the internet web-site. This requires a frames-capable browser such as Internet Explorer 4 or Netscape Navigator 4 or later. If you have seen the virtual tour web-site on the internet then you already have a suitable system (assuming you have a CD player in your PC!) for viewing the main elements of the CD. The only additional requirement is for an MPEG 1 player to show video clips. For PC users this is a standard component of the Windows Media Player and other players are freely available for no charge. As the data on the CD consists of only data files (mainly .htm, .jpg, .gif and .mpg files) there is no 'installation' procedure as such. You simply open the "index.htm" file in the root directory with your browser. Please also note that the HALIEN CD is intended to reflect the current state of the (ever-changing!) HALIEN internet site. Therefore, production of the CD is performed to order onto writeable CD-ROM (CD-R). Nearly all modern CD players can read data quite happily from CD-R. A few older players may give problems - so please check this before ordering if you are in any doubt.