Red-Zone Virtual Tours in UC QuakeStudies

A virtual tour of Christchurch's Red Zone is to be preserved in the UC QuakeStudies Digital Archive. 

Murray Quartly of Focus360 Virtual Website Tours uses sophisticated imaging techniques to create immersive panoramas of New Zealand landscapes.  Since the earthquakes, Quartly has been working on a comprehensive tour of Christchurch's ever-changing central city red zone.

These will be available to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license as part of the University of Canterbury's QuakeStudies Digital Archive.

Quartly chose to license the collection with Creative Commons so that people were able to access and use the panoramas. The files can be downloaded from UC QuakeStudies or viewed directly at Focus360.

"The panoramas provide a unique way to see how Christchurch is changing.  Ordinary photographs help, but the 360 degree view adds a sense of being there which people seem to really value," Quartly says. "It is a work in progress, and we aim to continue for a number of years as Christchurch recovers."

Quartly continues to visit around 20 locations, such as the Cathedral, the PGC building and CTV sites, every three to five months to document the changes to each site and its surrounding landscape.

CTV building site- 5 March 2012             

CTV building site- 9 June 2012               

CTV building site- 17 September 2012          

Images by Murray Quartly, Focus360, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.