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Virtual tour of Ventura - The Superliner designed for Britain

20 February 2007 | Dominic Sawyer

P&O Cruises have launched a website dedicated to the 2008 launch of their superliner, Ventura. The site provides a virtual tour with 3D environments along with embedded presenters including the ship’s British designer, Nick Munro and chef Marco Pierre White.

I enjoyed the virtual experience and I recommend you do the same, the 3D landscapes are certainly impressive and it is easy to navigate - let’s take a look at a few screenshots and see how things work.

Background

From the story on Travelmole today, the line’s head of brand marketing Philip Price says “Ventura is a very different kind of ship so we needed a very different way to communicate her contemporary feel. www.virtualventura.co.uk allows people to get a feel for what it will be like on board.

“When a ship is being built, it is a challenge to convey to potential passengers the standards, innovations and facilities that will be on board. Today’s technology allows us to bring the Ventura concept to life.”

The ship can be explored in two ways, either through the standalone virtual tour application or by exploring more traditional HTML pages that contain animated elements and links to the relevant sections of the virtual tour.

The standalone virtual tour and introduction

The virtual tour opens in a separate, custom sized pop up window and took about 60 seconds to load on a 2mb connection, not too bad considering the media content to preload, although it would have been a nice touch to have an image or slideshow. Still, a preload bar is displayed to keep you updated on progress.

Once loaded, Nick introduces you to the ship and gives you the choice to run the tour in self or auto mode. Having returned to the virtual tour more than once I wouldn’t mind the option to skip this intro.

Help and iconography

You are then presented with a help page, that can be accessed at any time during the tour itself. The tour is divided up into Ventura’s six onboard experiences covering Eating Out, Nights Out, Ventura days, Spa time, Child’s play and designer rooms.

Ventura Days

I’ve chosen the Ventura Days section and it currently houses five rooms to explore. Each room is represented by intricate and impressive pixel graphics and hovering the mouse gives you the lowdown on the room and pinpoints the location on the ship.

The Atrium

In any particular room, in this case the Atrium, you can use the arrows to navigate to other rooms. As you move through the onboard experiences there is a short pause as the background, interactive and animation elements load.

Other features on the site include an image gallery and virtual tour of the shipyard to keep up to date with the build progress.

Read more about the ship itself and key stats but I recommend taking the virtual tour!