Welcome to Their World
In much the same way as I watch multimedia through my fingers, until I find out there's stuff out there which is actually ok, I approach virtual tours with some apprehension. I'm not talking about the virtual tours I'm compelled to watch to see how dreadful someone else's décor is when I'm looking for houses I can't afford in the nicer parts of town, but the virtual tours that you might happen upon when you're quietly browsing around 
a corporate site looking for information on 4-way sockets or large black boxes. In general, these are very turgid affairs, with unfathomable navigation systems and hideously clunky video inserts which wouldn't look out of place on public access TV. However, there are occasionally some great examples of how these things can really communicate an idea, tell a story, or simply give an insight into a someone else's world.
Although I think its been available for a while, the Sun Labs Virtual Tour is one of those examples, and it manages to do all of those things. Notwithstanding the fact that the URL ends in .htm, which still gives me hives, the whole package is effortlessly slick and, dare I say, kind of exciting, with all that whooshing and clunking going on. The bit I really enjoyed though was the representation of the rooms that the esteemed Sun Labs folks reside in while they're exercising their enormous brains. You get to poke around and look at the clutter on their desks - complete with steaming cups of coffee and faux iPhones - and while you're there, there's a nice collection of video, effortlessly embedded into the environment. I spent about an hour in there this morning and didn't get bored once. I watched Paul Lamere's stuff twice.
Tunes: At The Drive-In: Cosmonaut
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