QuickTime VR - Panoramas

Panoramas

VR Panoramas are panoramic images which surround the viewer with an environment (inside, looking out), yielding a sense of place. They can be "stitched" together from several normal photographs or 2 images taken with a circular fisheye lens, or captured with specialized panoramic cameras, or rendered from 3D-modeled scenes. There are two type of VR Panorama:

• Single row panoramas, with a single horizontal row of photographs.
• multi-row panoramas, with several rows of photographs taken at different tilt angles.

VR Panoramas are further divided into those that include the top and bottom, called cubic or spherical panoramas, and those that do not, usually called cylindrical.

A single panorama, or node is captured from a single point in space. Several nodes and object movies can be linked together to allow a viewer to move from one location to another. Such multinode QuickTime VR movies are called scenes.

Apple's QuickTime VR file format has two representations for panoramic nodes:

• cylindrical (consisting of one 360° image wrapped around the viewer)
• cubic (consisting of a cube of six 90°x 90° images surrounding the viewer).

Each of these are typically subdivided or tiled into several smaller images, and stored in a special kind of QuickTime movie file, which requires the QuickTime plugin.

Hot spots can be embedded into the panorama, which when selected can invoke some action, for example moving to another panorama node.