The New York Times website (which already does just everything pretty well) has recently starting publishing lovely 360-degree panorama images of select occasions, such the recent opening Olympics ceremony in Beijing or John McCain’s nomination at the Republican Convention.

A quick look at the HTML source code confirms it’s all done in Adobe Flash, the same platform Google uses for their new Street View panoramas. While the ability to drag around in Flash (or Apple’s Quicktime) is nothing new, Google Street View and the Times panoramas are impressive for other reasons: in Google’s case it’s the sheer ambition and scope of the project, and in the case of the NY Times panoramas it’s the quality of the photography and of the real-time processing of the individual composite 2-D images to create such an impressive faux 3D whole: it’s particularly striking to pan down from the main spectacle to the more mundane shoes, cables, and strewn paper cups of the adjacent photographers (you can also pan straight up if you’d like, and the Flash object is smart enough to prevent you from coming back down full-circle along the other side, upside down).

The Times also adds audio from the event, which is also nice, and leads me to imagine how incredible it would be someday if one could interactively pan around inside a streaming video rather than a static image (I know, I’m never satisfied ). Of course, while that would amount to a true remote virtual presence, the bit stream required to pull that off would be far beyond what’s currently feasible given the CPU cycles available on the average home computer, let alone the typical user’s internet downstream bandwidth (currently barely good enough for non-panoramic video).

But kudos to the Times and Google for leveraging the Flash panorama functionality so impressively, even if the technology’s been around for a while. Maybe the takeaway here is that the technological tools alone aren’t enough to make a media experience truly compelling – maybe making really effective media still also involves good old-fashioned human elbow grease at some point (i.e. Google’s spectacular ambition or the Times’ high production values).

I’d like to think so.