Review on www.walkingworld.com

South West Coast Path DVD

The Virtual Book Company (admittedly rather tentatively) claim their South West Coast Path DVD to be the ‘world’s first fully interactive living book’. This may be pushing it a little. Nevertheless it’s an ambitious and well produced project which apparently took nine years from conception to completion.

Despite the title the DVD is not designed for folk undertaking the full South West Coast Path long distance path. Rather it’s aimed at the much larger audience of people visiting the area looking for attractions and short circular walks based on the coastal path. In this respect it is more travel guide than walking guide, with historical points of interest, National Trust properties, accommodation, pubs and more, although the 40 or so walk routes are more than enough to keep the average holidaymaker occupied.

The DVD is attractively packaged and comes with a printed user guide, a welcome addition that so many producers overlook. The interactive guide runs using the well established Flash player which means there should be no problem viewing it on a Windows PC or a Mac. The interface is clean, clear and easy to navigate, being mostly based around interactive maps of the area. You can zoom in and out of the map and select to display items such as pubs and points of interest.

Printed walking guides suffer from the inevitable changes in routes and background information that can happen and actually most disk-based guides are no different, as the information is usually ‘hard-coded’ into them. The Virtual Book Company gets round this by providing a good deal of the information through ‘soft-coded’ links to their own website and other websites by key partners. The linking system is clearly quite clever in that it allows the company to maintain those links without having to change the links on the DVD; so, in theory at least, the DVD never goes out of date. In effect they have created a hybrid between a disk-based guide and a website.

So what’s the point of having the disk at all? Well the answer really lies in the video clips and photographs included in the guide, which would take forever to download over the internet. There are more than 800 high definition photographs and a series of video clips to accompany some of the routes featured on the DVD. These clips include 3D fly-throughs generated in Memory-Map digital mapping software using both OS mapping and aerial photography. Users of Memory-Map will recognise how useful these fly-throughs are in visualising the route through the landscape (and if you do have Memory-Map you can download GPX files for each route to load into your application and export to your GPS).

However for people new to the area the short video documentaries showing the walk and key points of interest to be found on the way are probably the most useful addition. There’s no doubt that moving pictures portray the walk much more effectively than any number of still images. These video clips are concise and professionally shot and edited, showing you just enough to decide whether the walk is for you.

A guide on DVD won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but if you are planning a trip to the area the £20 or so it costs seems a reasonable price to pay to get an initial insight into the attractions and a series of possible walks. You can buy it direct from the publishers at www.virtualbookcompany.co.uk