geekabit

Each room has its own page with photos taken from multiple angles, each with a little description. Every door and window is clickable and leads to other rooms and spaces.

The "engine" was written in PHP3 and used text files containing image maps and descriptions to render the pages. Everything was hosted on the webserver you can see in the cellar.

While everything worked fine in 2003, nearly 2 decades later the server is long gone, along with everything on it. A few pages were saved by the Wayback Machine, which I used as basis for the recreation. All missing pages had to be remade and missing images have been replaced where possible. All descriptions have been expanded, especially where no replacement images could be found.

Since the engine was also gone, it had to be recreated as well. Instead of doing it again in ancient PHP, this would make a nice first project in Python. All pages are rendered once and stored as static HTML. Since I was modernizing, I upgraded the generated pages from XHTML 1.0 strict to html5 and css. That should probably hold for another decade or two.

Since 2003 the concept of a virtual tour in your browser has become more common. While a modern virtual environment such as Google Street View (launched in 2007) will look more polished, this one captures the 2003 spirit just fine.

The virtual tour is made (twice) with open source tools and released into the public domain. Code is available in the downloads directory of this article.

Don't forget to take your virtual tour.