Quicktime VR TestsUpdate: Take a look at my California Panoramas page. Some notesI downloaded the evaluation version of a commercial "panorama stitcher" called PanaVue to create these panoramas. The free evaluation version places product logos in the panorama. The full version costs $64, and of course it does not place the logos in the panorama.There are various software packages with similar functionality available for the Mac, priced at about $40 and up, but PanaVue works only on PCs. The new links at the bottom of this page point to other available image stitchers and general info on the topic. I could not find any shareware program to create VR panoramas. PanaVue does quite a good job of fitting together images - much more easily, I think, than trying to do fit them by hand with Photoshop. PanaVue provides the additional essential steps of wrapping the ends of the series into a closed 360 degree loop and processing the image into the Quicktime VR format, functions not available via Photoshop. The panoramas can be produced with various tradeoffs between file size and quality. I produced a quite high resolution Quicktime VR panorama that was over three megabytes in size - too large for most home browsers to download, but great to include on a CD. On the panoramas page are two lower-quality (but still quite good, I think) versions of the panorama. The "medium resolution" panorama is about 600K - maybe still too much of a download for a person sitting at a home browser to await. The "low resolution" panorama is just 121K. I think the panorama came out very nice. The photography and subject are really great - the amount of overlap worked well in production, but the camera was pointed higher at some times than at others, causing irregular spaces at top and bottom. If you are interested in seeing a really neat collection of Quicktime VR's, check out this link to ancient stone monuments. I'm actually quite pleased at how well the process worked. It was actually a fairly simple process. Quicktime VR Links (12/18/99)
PanaVue ImageAssembler Free Downloads |