Caroling Geary

Caroling Geary is a 80+ year-old artist who looks to the web for communication and building worldwide community. On her web site, Wholeo Online at wholeo.net, panoramas were an integral part of her envisioning. Seeing all around is akin to the quest for the whole self and expanding consciousness. Interactive immersive imaging is a largely unexplored medium of online expression.

1n 1997, Caroling went spinning around rooms at leary.com in QTVRs by Janie Fitzgerald, whose site at vrview.com became an inspiration. That led to joining the Apple QuickTime VR list, where Robert Abbett proposed the first world wide panoramic shoot. By coincidence it was on the solstice, December 21, 1997. With point and shoot camera, stitching in Photoshop, and little knowledge of the how-to, Caroling decided to try, because she had a great subject, the Paso de los Suenos or Gateway of Dreams, a sculpture oriented to the light of the seasons in California, USA.

Although she was a beta tester of QTVR in QuickTime 5 when it went cubic, Caroling has not mastered a technique of spherical photography. However, she explores up and down in Photoshop, waiting and longing for a spherical painting program. Panorama Tools and ptviewer, the java applet path to panoramas opened up vistas with the equirectangular source image. It also sensitized Caroling to pressures on the QTVR community by commercial and business interests, calling for activism.

Trained as a fine artist, earning BA and MFA degrees at the University of Minnesota, Caroling had two careers: first as a stained glass artist and lastly as programmer and technical writer for the computer industry. She created her portrait in whirling colors at Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) on a purple hi-end graphics system running IRIX, using Showcase software. If you see a swastika motif, see this page for Caroling's idea to reclaim this ancient symbol.

In 2007, QuickTime lost the ability to display Flash tracks, breaking Caroling's entries for wwp606: Garden (audio), wwp306: Borders, and wwp1205: Blessings. In 2009, Flash versions with the original content are displayed on the respective pages of wholeo.net. See links at the bottom of individual pages. In 2012 360 panoramas are challenging to see, especially on some mobile devices. If you want to see more about a subject, click links.