St. Andrews, Scotland - How to use the Multimedia Guide and Virtual Reality Tour

St Andrews
Links to all things to do with St Andrews, Scotland

St. Andrews - Multimedia Guide - Navigating the Guide

The guide provides a description of the user interface for the St. Andrews Multimedia Guide.

St. Andrews - Navigating the Guide in Virtual Reality
Down the left side of the screen is a menu bar which should always be visible. If it is not, pressing the "home" button on any page should activate it. The title "St.Andrews" is followed by a small window with a continuously scrolling view of St. Andrews. (If this is not working it means you have a Java problem) As you move your mouse over the buttons they should brighten (If they don't, you have a Java Script Problem) If you pause with the mouse steady over a button, a description of the button's function will appear.	The layout is best viewed on a monitor with 800x600 resolution. With the browser maximized to fill the screen.	To the right of the main view, in the light grey sidebar, may appear icons representing special features relevant to this page ... e.g. QuickTime Virtual Reality Movie, Video or Sound Clips. If these icons are missing it implies the feature is not present on the page. Clicking on the icon will activate that feature.

	The main picture is the virtual reality scene. As soon as you click anywhere on the picture it will stop scrolling and allow you to drag the picture around with the mouse. As the mouse passes over "hot-spots" the spot is outlined in blue and a description appears next to the cursor (see castle outlined above). If you click on the hot-spot the appropriate next scene or page will opened, allowing one to move from scene to scene. Pressing the space bar, after at least one click on the picture, will highlight all hot spots in a scene. Pressing the space bar again will clear the highlighting. Immediately below the screen is a grey area with menu buttons. These are described below. Also in the gray area are links to other VR Tour sites or other pages of information one can visit which are relevant to that scene. Below the virtual reality segment is descriptive text, photos and other links. The initial text may be in italics, indicating it is of significance to thos who may visit this scene in reality, i.e. personally. The remaining text describes the place which is the subject of the scene.
A Description of the Buttons On the left sidebar This button begins the virtual tour. The tour starts at the top of St. Rules Tower. This button will take you to a 3-dimensional map of St. Andrews town centre. The map is clickable to jump to any virtual tour scene and several web pages of interest. On the right sidebar (or elsewhere in the guide) This icon indicates that a Quicktime Virtual Reality movie of the scene is available. This requires a plug-in/ movie player from Apple Computer which is available here. This icon indicates that a video clip is available for viewing. The video clip is on a related theme. These clips are usually .AVI files and can be large, requiring significant download time. This RubberNeck icon indicates a virtual reality scene on a related theme is available for visiting. This icon indicates that an audio clip is available for viewing. The audio clip is on a related theme. This icon, appearing throughout the guide, indicates that there is recommended further reading available at our on-line bookstore. This gold star indicates a business establishment which offers a discount to customers who book or buy via this St. Andrews page or their web page. Click on the star to go to the discounts description page. Under the virtual reality scene This button will take you to the previous virtual reality scene on the tour. Using next and previous buttons enables the visitor to follow a guided tour of St. Andrews. It is possible to get off the tour and rejoin at any time. This button will return you to the opening page of the www.saint-andrews.co.uk site. This button will display a map of the town, with a flashing arrow pointing to where you are in town. If at first you see an arrow on a blanl back ground then please be patient the background map may take a while to load, but afterwards, further references to maps of the tour should be much faster as the same background map is used each time. This button, will take you to the help page. This button will take you to the next part of the virtual tour of St.Andrews. Following this route, every virtual scene will be visited, and the visitor will gain a thorough impression of St. Andrews. Scrolling Text, as seen below, stops scrolling when the mouse is over it. The mouse can be used to drag the text up or down to see other areas or to click on links. Sorry, Your browser doesn't support JAVA