[thelist] Panoramas/3d

[Ben Dyer]

At 05:31 PM 9/24/2001, you wrote:
> >I am currently looking for information to develop panoramic/3d displays.
>
>Regarding the panoramic display, you may want to try Poor Man's VR located
>at
>http://www.duckware.com/pmvr.html
>
>PMVR is a Java applet able to displays 360 degree panoramic images in a web
>page, as well as limited angle, if so desired.
>
>On the mentioned page it says:
>"PMVR was designed as an alternative to Apple's QTVR because QTVR requires a
>large plug-in to be installed first. QTVR is great if users already have it
>installed but if not, it is a pain to wait to install the plug-in. Many
>users will not wait for QTVR to install and will just move on -- your
>opportunity for impressing the visitor gone forever"

And if I may make the contrary argument, if Java nukes your browser (as the 
old Java applet rule dictates: "Write once, crash everywhere"), you are all 
but guaranteed that the user won't be back.  And many people do have 
QuickTime installed. (All that QuickTime VR requires is version 3 of 
QuickTime, which was two versions ago.)

On an anecdotal note, I've had problems watching users and Java applets 
because they are often under the (misguided) impression that the web site 
has crashed their computer, when, in fact, the browser is just taking a 
long time to crank Java up.

Oh yeah, and Java won't be shipping with WinXP/IE6 (nor will Netscape-style 
plug-ins be supported, like what QT uses, but supposedly Apple has a fix 
for that), so the "no downloading" argument for Java isn't always correct.

Personally, I've had very good luck with QuickTime VR.  It works well, has 
many features, is easy to create (if you have a Mac at your disposal), and 
tends to work more often than the other products I've played with (like iPix).

--Ben


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Ben Dyer, Senior Internet Developer, Imaginuity Interactive
http://www.imaginuity.com/
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