VR information
We've written a bit about photographic
techniques. I'm also finishing up an article about the birth
of photographic VR and I'll be adding some technical notes about
the applet.
Photographic VR Links
Since I made Freedom VR, I've collected a number of links to other
sites with information and software about photographic VR, I'm also
compiling a bibliography from the paper literature. Believe it or
not, the first reference I can find to work in photographic VR was
a 1980 paper by Andrew Lippman who was part of a team who
drove a van around
Aspen, CO to build a VR model of the city.
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Free software
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Piet Jonas from Germany has written a panorama
applet which implements real smooth scrolling, just like Quicktime
VR! Performance is excellent on any platform with a just-in-time
compiler and tolerable on my Pentium/133 laptop running Linux without JITC.
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Commercial software
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Live Pictures produces
a commercial image stitching program titled Photovista for the Macintosh
and Windows. It's amazingly easy to use -- it automatically figures
how to overlap the images. The quality of the panoramas I've made
with it aren't as good as what I've seen done with Apple's Quicktime VR
tools, but it might be the fault of the source images. It can
output panoramic JPEGs that can be played with Jonas's or Nemeth's applet
or several other formats. You can download an evaluation version
for free, which will let you determine if it's worth $79 to you.
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Andrew Nemeth has written a scrolling
image map applet which costs $10 which can play VR panoramas;
it's not as advanced as the applet above, but it is faster on non-JIT
java implementations.
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Apple Computer introduced the first commercial implementation of Photographic
VR, the infamous Quicktime
VR.
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Technology