In the world of the World Wide Web, the award for "next best thing to being there" usually goes to the QuickTime Virtual Reality panorama, or QTVR.

The immersive qualities of QTVRs will be familiar to most web surfers, but these interactive vistas are spread pretty thin across the web, and those that are available are too often of marginal photographic quality and/or disappointingly small size. Fullscreen QTVR has set out to overcome all three of these negatives, and, has succeeded. So if the idea of exploring the world -and beyond- from your desktop appeals to you, Fullscreen QTVR would like a few minutes of your time.

Drawing on the resources and archives of two already existing QTVR websites (VRMAG and panoramas.dk), the Fullscreen collection begins with a subset of more than 100 files - from more than 26 countries - gathered by Panoramas, one of the two websites mentioned above. The variety of subject matter available in this opening collection can be deduced from a sampling that includes a UNESCO-protected church in Cyprus, Antarctica, Mars, the Taj Mahal, Saint Mark's Square in Venice, Times Square in New York, and the deck of a brigantine circumnavigating Australia. There's also a good selection of subjects you might not expect to find even in such a complete library, such as an underwater panorama of a World War II shipwreck off Bali and, believe it or not, the inside of a dental patient's mouth.

As the site name promises, all the QTVRs here fill the browser's screen. (At least they do on my screen, and I'm guessing that there are more files to accommodate larger monitors.) Each panorama opens into its own window, with a few paragraphs of information about the location, complete with an instant link to Alta-Vista's Babel Fish for those who may wish to translate the contents, and a chronological listing of additional panoramas.dk offerings. (No descriptions of subject matter in this list - there's no room - but those who'd rather not explore blindly can always return to the thumbnail-rich Panoramas index pages.)

Panoramas also has a series of themed collections, dedicated to particular topics. Examples include 2 files depicting the interior and exterior of a Mercedes-Benz, 16 exploring the Vatican's Basilicas, 6 of a 1930s wind tunnel, and 9 of the UCI Mountain Bike & Trial World Championship 2003. Unlike the panoramas.dk set, these presentations can have as many as three links related to each subject.

Naturally, even though this site appears to be on a fast server, a full screen QTVR takes a few seconds to download, so if you start panning before the file is complete, you'll temporarily encounter either a blurred image or holodeck-style grid that will make Star Trek fans feel right at home. The images are well worth the wait though, both technically and aesthetically, and with the high quality and varied subject matter, I eventually found myself thinking of these photographs as a 21st century version of the Kodak Coloramas that once hung in Grand Central Station.

And while all the panoramas are equal in size, there are minor variations in presentation. In addition to the typical, horizontal 360 degree panoramic files, many QTVRs include spherical (or in QuickTime's terminology, "Cubic") coverage. In addition, some files include sound, and some of these even incorporate a stereo element that shifts playback from one speaker to the other as you pan.

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