HOME TOPICS ABOUT ME MAIL
Full-screen QTVR can take its place as a serious graphics format.
|
| technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T e c h n o f i l e
Virtual reality grows up in stunningly realistic photo panoramas
July 11, 2004
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard
Are you tired of reality TV? Maybe it's time for another kind of
reality -- the virtual kind. You can immerse yourself in virtual
reality videos and come as close to getting away from it all as the
laws of physics allow.
Virtual reality, or VR, puts the viewer into the middle of a 3D scene.
By moving your mouse or pressing certain keys, your vantage point
changes, as if you were looking up or down or to the side, or as if you
were walking forward or backward.
To view a VR video (or "movie," as it's usually called), you need
Apple's QuickTime software. It's free. Don't fret if you're not an
Apple computer user; QuickTime is available for all versions of Windows
as well as Apple's own Macintosh computers. The QuickTime software
automatically shows QuickTime VR movies. You don't have to do anything
special.
VR seems to have grown up since the last time I spent any time enjoying
it. The VR movies I remember from the past often were fuzzy or just
plain silly. But the ones I've collected off the Web in the last few
weeks are spectacular. I'm especially impressed by the variety of
full-screen QuickTime VR (QTVR) movies. With a large monitor and the
increased image resolution of Apple's current QuickTime VR software,
full-screen QTVR can take its place as a serious graphics format.
To see for yourself, start with the amazing Hans Nyberg, inventor of
the modern full-screen virtual reality Web site. He has two
QTVR-related sites -- www.qtvr.dk (chose the English version if you
don't know Danish) and http://panoramas.dk/.
Make sure you have the latest QuickTime software, then go to the first
site and look for a link to the QTVR of the recent Danish royal
wedding. You should see a wide fisheye photo on the main royal wedding
page. Click that photo to open a large view of Nyberg's main QTVR
movie, with thumbnail views of all five royal wedding QTVR movies at
the right.
To look in any direction in the main QVTR movie, click your left (or
primary) mouse button and slowly drag it while holding the button down.
Drag in the direction you want to turn your gaze. You can pan up and
down, too. (Be sure to take a long look at the gold-leaf designs and
paintings on the ceiling.) Pressing the Shift key (Windows or Mac)
zooms you closer, and pressing the Ctrl key on either computer zooms
you out.
Fast pans work well only if you have a very fast computer. The entire
QuickTime movie is fetched from the remote site in Denmark before
you're able to pan in all directions, so your Internet connection speed
is not a factor in how the QTVR is shown.
Clicking on any of the thumbnails on the right opens that QTVR on the
main screen. I was fascinated to note that one of the royal QTVR
movies, the Wedding March, had a virtual reality 3D sound track. When I
panned across the balcony, the sound shifted just as it would in the
"real" kind of reality, so that when I changed my gaze to the back --
when I turned my virtual head around, in other words -- the sound of
the royal orchestra came from behind me. It even shifted properly and
came from below me when I looked up. I found that incredible.
After you've called the neighbors in to see this marvel, visit a few
more QTVR sites. There's www.panoguide.net, for QTVR enthusiasts, and www.fullscreenqtvr.com, which has links to many of the best full-screen QTVR movies on the Web. My favorite QTVR movie (apart from the ones
taken at the Danish royal wedding) probably is the Yulong River scene
from China. View it at www.panoramas.dk/fullscreen3/f14.html.
These panoramic scenes are so good you'll want to view them again and
again. And you can, without needing to go to the Web site. Simply
download the QuickTime movies to a folder on your computer, then double
click them to have QuickTime show them without the browser.
The easiest way to do this is to right click (or Ctrl-click) on the
link for the QTVR movie you want to download. In other words, instead
of opening the link, right click or Ctrl-click and choose "Download"
from the options.
| |