Putting Sound and Video into Web Pages
QTVR Format (Quicktime Virtual Reality)
The World Revolves Around The Viewer
Layman's Basic Description Of The Model
You are strapped in a chair that you can swivel left/right the full 360 degrees, and
you are looking out through a pair of glasses that give you a view of what you see. When
you swivel left your view of the scene moves to the left, if you swivel right, the scene
moves right.
Your glasses have a zoom feature, you at the touch of a button you can zoom in/out your
view of the scene.
If your swivel chair is the deluxe version that allows you to also tilt back/forward in
it, right around doing a summersolt. It's sort of like floating in space, where you can
rotate yourself in any direction, but you can not move in any direction.
Unfortunately, your chair does not have thrusters, so you can not move towards or away
from anything. However, if Scotty is willing, you might get him to transport you to
another location in the VR world.
Examples
Briefly How Are They Made?
By photographing an existing scene.
- First one photographs the scene with a camera and takes overlapping pictures. Note: to
prevent one's VR world from wobbling as the views change a special camera mount is used
that keeps the film place.
- These pictures are then digitized and cleaned up (you don't want a dusty environment do
you?).
- Using QTVR software, the individual pictures are "stitched" together to form
an panorama photograph that cover the inside a sphere. The amount of the sphere that is
covered depends on the coverage you provide via the pictures.
- If you look at the QTVR picture with a normal viewer, it would look very distorted, with
straight les looking curved, and everything looking bent.
- However, with a QTVR viewer which corrects the prespective, everything looks fine in
it's windows.
Variations To The Path
- Although it is possible to move the camera position, usually it creates a very bad movie
where the users feels unsteady.
- You might be able to create the effect of having a round room and having the person
travel in a circle inside it always looking at the wall.
Note: QTVR images from Apple's WWW site
