An evening in Dubai from your home

The world’s first online interactive tour Dubai 360 recently added more than 140 nighttime panoramas of the city and skyline to their already robust site.

The photos were taken over the summer by three photographers from the team to showcase the city’s life after the sun goes down, and give residents and tourists alike an uncanny view of Dubai.

The site was originally launched in January of this year with 1,298 pieces of content. The tour utilizes panoramas, time-lapse videos and regular video tours. Users can hop from one place to another using icons on the map, and even tour the city from the helicopter.

“We really wanted to showcase Dubai in an interactive way and very high quality so that anybody can see it,” Gerald Donovan, operations manager at Dubai 360, said. “There may be people out there who will never visit Dubai, or people who are thinking of visiting Dubai. Then there are also people in Dubai who want to explore the city virtually themselves, and it’s just to give a new and innovative way to explore that city, and then go and explore it themselves.”

The collection of more than half a million photographs creates almost 2,200 stunning panoramas to give visitors and residents alike an incredible online tour of the global city. It couples the pictures with informative boxes of text you can click on as you go through an area. Users can easily hop from one part of the city to the next with helicopter views captured with mounts made by the Dubai360 team.

For Donovan, one of the most rewarding moments of the launch was when they sent over the photos to their copywriter to write the description. Soon after she started writing the descriptions, she sent him an email declaring her newfound appreciation for the city she had lived in for a decade.

“I think people often think of Dubai as being the glitzy hotels and malls and things like that, but Dubai has a lot of history as well,” Donovan said. “So we added a lot of content in the heritage sites in Dubai.”

Dubai360 has also been busy breaking records online. In June of this year the site announced the availability of the first ever 8K-resolution interactive 360-degree video on its YouTube channel.

The site has become wildly popular, with visits from every country. Every piece of content has been explored including incredible sights like the view from the top of Burj Khalifa, a tour of the old market and even tours of 18-hole golf courses.

With an ever-changing landscape like that of Dubai, this project has become a record of the metropolis’ growth.

“We’re going to continue shooting both new content, and reshooting existing content so we can keep up with the changes,” Donovan said. “So I think the Burj Khalifa gigapixel, as it gets updated every couple of years, that’s the one that is going to be interesting to watch to see the development of the city.“