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QuickTime VR

QuickTime VR (QTVR) extends QuickTime’s interactive capabilities by creating an immersive user experience that simulates three-dimensional objects and places. In QuickTime VR, user interactivity is enhanced because you can control QTVR panoramas and QTVR object movies by clicking and dragging various hot spots with the mouse.

A QTVR panorama lets you stand in a virtual place and look around. It provides a full 360 panorama and in QuickTime, the ability to tilt up and down a full 180. The actual horizontal and vertical range, however, is determined by the panorama itself. To look left, right, up and down, you simply drag with the mouse across the panorama.

QTVR object movies, by contrast, allow you to “handle” an object, so you can see it from every angle. You can rotate it, tilt it, and turn it over.

A QTVR scene can include multiple, linked panoramas and objects.

“Figure 1-16” shows an illustration of a QuickTime VR panoramic movie in Mac OS X, with various controls to manipulate the panorama.

In this section:

The QuickTime VR Media Type
Creating QTVR Movies Programmatically

The QuickTime VR Media Type

QuickTime VR is a media type that lets users examine and explore photorealistic, three-dimensional virtual worlds. The result is sometimes called immersive imaging. Virtual reality information is typically stored as a panorama, made by stitching many images together so they surround the user’s viewpoint or surround an object that the user wants to examine. The panorama then becomes the media structure for a QuickTime movie track.

There are hundreds of ways that VR movies can transform the QuickTime experience, creating effects that are truly spectacular, such as a view to the sky from a forest, as illustrated in the cubic panorama in “Figure 1-17.”

“Figure 1-18” shows an illustration from a QuickTime VR panoramic movie, where you can look directly upward to the night sky from the ground level in Times Square in New York.

Using VR controls, you can move up and down 180 degrees and navigate freely around the surface edges of the nearby skyscrapers.

Creating QTVR Movies Programmatically

Users with very little experience can take advantage of applications such as QuickTime VR Authoring Studio to capture virtual reality panoramas from still or moving images and turn them into QuickTime VR movie tracks.

Alternatively, the software you write can make calls to the QuickTime VR Manager to create VR movies programmatically or to give your user virtual reality authoring capabilities. Once information is captured in the VR file format, your code can call QuickTime to

• display movies of panoramas and VR objects

• perform basic orientation, positioning, and animation control

• intercept and override QuickTime VR’s mouse-tracking and default hot spot behaviors

• combine flat or perspective overlays (such as image movies or 3D models) with VR movies

• specify transition effects

• control QuickTime VR’s memory usage

• intercept calls to some QuickTime VR Manager functions and modify their behavior

The next chapters in this book discuss many of the ways that your code can take advantage of QuickTime, as well as the tools and techniques available to your application for enhanced user interactivity.

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