Charleston, SC - September 16, 2000 – Eden Street Software announces the release of the Charleston ArmchairTour, the first product in the ArmchairTour: Historic City series. This innovative CD-based product contains the entire historic district in digital form, allowing users to explore the area – every street, every house, every church, park, and alley – as if they were actually there.

“It's like nothing you've seen before,” explains Patrick Cumby, president of Eden Street Software. “We call the concept immersive discovery – you can walk up and down the streets, go inside many of the homes and churches, even stop and talk to the locals.”

The Charleston ArmchairTour is remarkably comprehensive, including detailed information on over a thousand sites in the original walled city and the colonial districts south of Broad Street. “If it's there in the real world, it's there in the ArmchairTour,” says Cumby. “When we say every street, every block, every house, we really mean it!”

The ArmchairTour was meticulously researched and photographed in an effort to make it the most complete single-source of information about Charleston’s historic district ever published. It contains nearly 3,000 photographs, as well as interactive spherical panoramas (where the user controls the camera angle) – there are even hundreds of historical photos where you can see how the city has changed over the past 140 years.

In addition to the free-explore mode, where the users can stroll the streets on their own, there are dozens of specialty tours, from “Front Doors,” to “Disasters and Calamities” and “Pirates, Duels, and Ghosts.”

Ed Macy of Tour Charleston (www.tourcharleston.com), one of the city’s most respected tour companies, narrates the ArmchairTour. Macy has appeared on the Discovery Channel, the Home and Garden Network, and has been featured in Southern Living magazine.  Guest narrator and Gullah Tours (www.gullahtours.com) guide Alphonso Brown also gives his special twist on the Sea Islands traditions for which Charleston is famous, and lends his voice to one of the four characters who tell the history of Charleston through their ancestor’s stories.

In addition to the physical city tours, the product also includes a museum with exhibits like an interactive historic timeline, photo galleries, artisan profiles, and information about the natural history of the area. There’s even a virtual version of Washington Park, where you can meet a few Charlestonians and find out what it’s like to be a native.

“While the amount of information in each tour may be encyclopedic, the ArmchairTour is no dry scholarly work,” said Cumby. “There’s a treasure hunt where you must follow clues in and around the hidden alleyways, there are ghost stories, pirate lore, even a couple of Charleston crossword puzzles. It’s a fun way for tourists to learn about the city before they visit, and a way for them to remember it after they leave.”