Kyoto’s own Mercury Software has put their excellent  360° panoramas of Kyoto gardens online, I learned yesterday afternoon from shacho Ian Shortreed, when I bumped into him buying bread. The virtual tours of two dozen or so of Kyoto’s finest temple gardens run in Flash served from Amazon S3 servers. Definitely worth an extended contemplative visit!

A decade ago, I made use of some of Ian’s work in my presentation at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2002 conference in San Antonio, Texas. Related work on a shape-processing based analysis of dry landscape gardens (枯山水) was later published in a short paper in Nature magazine and a more extensive one in the philosophy journal Axiomathes.

Though their main business is in multi-lingual writing tools, Mercury also sells the iTabi, a wabi-sabi iPhone/iPod pouch available in traditional Kyoto textile designs.