GlacierWorks and Microsoft set up an interactive Everest site

Microsoft and GlacierWorks recently announced the launch of an interactive site dedicated to Mount Everest. The site is called " Everest: Rivers of Ice ", and this resource allows you to take a virtual journey along the mountain, not only in space but also in time. So, the developers added a history of changes in climatic conditions / appearance of the peak for many decades. Plus there is the opportunity to view the history of the development of climbing routes on Everest for 60 years.

By the way, the site itself is made entirely in HTML5, and contains gigapixel panoramas of Everest and the surrounding peaks. You can spend a lot of time on the site, even if you are not keen on mountaineering. One of the tasks facing the developers of the site was to help climbers from home work out a detailed route to the top. And I must say that the resource can really help athletes-climbers.

In order to understand what climate changes have occurred over several decades, the creators of the site have provided a comparison of panoramic images of past years and the present.



GlacierWorks representatives have undertaken about 14 expeditions to the region over the past 7 years to obtain detailed information on the state of the glaciers above. Photos on expeditions were obtained using the Canon 5D Mark II, with lenses from Canon and Zeiss. The total amount of graphic information in the archive reaches about 7 terabytes, with a resolution of most photos 5616 x 3744. All these photos were brought together in a panorama with a resolution of 120,000 x 31840 pixels. It is worth noting that all this work was done by GlacierWorks.

As for Microsoft, its specialists developed this site, turning all these mega-photos into an interactive panorama. At the same time, the experience of the Rich Interactive Narratives (RIN) project was used. The site works fine with all modern browsers, but, of course, Microsoft announced that it is best to use Internet Explorer 10.