QuickTime VR

Last updated
QuickTime VR
Filename extension
.qtvr
Internet media type
video/quicktime
x-world/x-qtvr
Developed by Apple Inc.
Initial releaseJuly 1995;27 years ago (July 1995) [1]
Type of format Image file format
Contained by QuickTime File Format
Open format?No

QuickTime VR (also known as QTVR) is an image file format developed by Apple Inc. for QuickTime, and discontinued along with QuickTime 7. It allows the creation and viewing of VR photography, photographically captured panoramas, and the viewing of objects photographed from multiple angles. It functions as plugins for the QuickTime Player and for the QuickTime Web browser plugin.

Contents

History

QuickTime VR was conceived in 1991 by programmers Eric Chen and Ian Small of the Human Interface Group in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple, utilizing a Cray supercomputer to process images into panoramas. It was soon made prominent within the company by Apple's board member and former astronaut Sally Ride, who was fascinated by the demonstrated possibilities of 3D computer imagery. [2]

The first way I did panoramic photography was a little bit of a cheat. So what you do is, you take a million pictures and you animate between them. I did all this with a single camera, because imagining the matrix of cameras we now use was just too expensive. It was extremely onerous, the stitching and all of that. It was quite a lot of work. The head-mounted VR did exist at that time. So it was a poor man's VR. Calling it VR was controversial and somewhat presumptuous.

Dan O'Sullivan, early QuickTime VR engineer [2]

It was publicly launched in 1995 as part of QuickTime 2, by a dedicated group including Chen, Small, senior content engineer Ted Casey, and program manager Eric Zarakov. [3] :99 Apple sold the content authoring tools for US$2,000(equivalent to $3,557 in 2021) plus a $0.40-$0.80 royalty fee per commercial CD-ROM disc depending on the number of QuickTime VR movies, or no royalty charge for non-commercial usage. [3] :100 Upon launch, it was used as supporting technology in digital publications such as the Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual. [2] [3] :100 The first high-profile public application of QuickTime VR is the 1995 courtroom visualization of the crime scenes in the O. J. Simpson murder case. [4]

The platform was deemphasized upon the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in 1997. [2] The discontinuation of QuickTime 7 in the late 2000s brought the end of development and support of QuickTime VR and other major technologies.

Overview

Panoramas

Panoramas are panoramic images which surround the viewer with an environment (inside, looking out), yielding a sense of place. They can be stitched together from several normal photographs or 2 images taken with a circular fisheye lens, or captured with specialized panoramic cameras, or rendered from 3D-modeled scenes. There are two types of panoramas:

Panoramas are further divided into those that include the top and bottom, called cubic or spherical panoramas, and those that do not, usually called cylindrical.

Example of a cylindrical panorama. Taken with a Nikon Coolpix 5000 and stitched with Apple Inc.'s QuickTime Authoring Studio. Panorama-RainyCourtyard.jpg
Example of a cylindrical panorama. Taken with a Nikon Coolpix 5000 and stitched with Apple Inc.'s QuickTime Authoring Studio.

A single panorama, or node, is captured from a single point in space. Several nodes and object movies can be linked together to allow a viewer to move from one location to another. Such multinode QuickTime VR movies are called scenes.

Apple's QuickTime VR file format has two representations for panoramic nodes:

Each of these are typically subdivided or tiled into several smaller images, and stored in a special kind of QuickTime movie file, which requires the QuickTime plugin.

Hot spots can be embedded into the panorama, which when selected can invoke some action, for example moving to another panorama node.

Example of a cylindrical panorama. Taken with a Canon Digital Rebel XT Pyramid Peak Desolation02.jpg
Example of a cylindrical panorama. Taken with a Canon Digital Rebel XT

Objects

In contrast to panoramas, which are captured from one location looking out at various angles, objects are captured from many locations pointing in toward the same central object.

The simplest type of objects to capture are single row, typically captured around the equator of an object. This is normally facilitated by a rotating turntable. The object is placed on the turntable, and photographed at equal angular increments (usually 10°) from a camera mounted on a tripod.

Capturing a multi-row object movie requires a more elaborate setup for capturing images, because the camera must be tilted above and below the equator of the object at several tilt angles.

The image source does not have to be photographic. 3D renderings or drawings can be used.

Reception

In 1995, MacWorld cited some pioneering multimedia developers with a shared viewpoint fanatically in favor of QuickTime VR technology but against Apple's $0.40-$0.80 royalty fee per commercial CD-ROM unit plus US$2,000 fee for authoring tools, and some halting their existing efforts in protest. The magazine's exhaustive overview concluded with this: "QuickTime VR is an impressive achievement that reinforces Apple's role as the innovator in personal computer multimedia. But Apple's zeal to turn QuickTime VR into a profit center may slow its initial adoption and perhaps even relegate it to the backseat of Microsoft's limousine. As this issue went to press, Apple was reconsidering its requirement that developers pay royalties on titles that incorporate QuickTime VR. As well it should." [3] :108

Legacy

In 2016, Business Insider reflected on the long-term impact of QuickTime VR: "It's difficult not to read about Apple's experiments with panoramic images and not draw a connection to the recent rise of 360-degree videos on platforms like Facebook and YouTube — or even the immersive aspects of services like Google Maps Street View. Much of what's called VR these days isn't a full interactive environment, but is instead a descendant of the panoramic images that Apple pioneered."

See also

Related Research Articles

View camera Large-format camera

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Panorama Wide-angle view or representation of a physical space

A panorama is any wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in painting, drawing, photography, film, seismic images, or 3D modeling. The word was originally coined in the 18th century by the English painter Robert Barker to describe his panoramic paintings of Edinburgh and London. The motion-picture term panning is derived from panorama.

Panoramic photography is a technique of photography, using specialized equipment or software, that captures images with horizontally elongated fields of view. It is sometimes known as wide format photography. The term has also been applied to a photograph that is cropped to a relatively wide aspect ratio, like the familiar letterbox format in wide-screen video.

VR may refer to:

Gigapixel image Digital image bitmap composed of one billion pixels

A gigapixel image is a digital image bitmap composed of one billion (109) pixels (picture elements), 1000 times the information captured by a 1 megapixel digital camera. A square image of 31,623 pixels in width and height is one gigapixel. Current technology for creating such very high-resolution images usually involves either making digital image mosaics of many high-resolution digital photographs or using a film negative as large as 12" × 9" (30 cm × 23 cm) up to 18" × 9" (46 cm × 23 cm), which is then scanned with a high-end large-format film scanner with at least 3000 dpi resolution. Only a few cameras are capable of creating a gigapixel image in a single sweep of a scene, such as the Pan-STARRS PS1 and the Gigapxl Camera.

Virtual tour Simulation of an existing location

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A rotating line camera is a digital camera that uses a linear CCD array to assemble a digital image as the camera rotates. The CCD array may consist of three sensor lines, one for each RGB color channel. Advanced rotating line cameras may have multiple linear CCD arrays on the focal plate and may capture multiple panoramic images during their rotation.

Perspective control

Perspective control is a procedure for composing or editing photographs to better conform with the commonly accepted distortions in constructed perspective. The control would:

Panning (camera) Swivelling a camera horizontally from a fixed position

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Photosynth

Photosynth is a discontinued app and service from Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington that analyzes digital photographs and generates a three-dimensional model of the photos and a point cloud of a photographed object. Pattern recognition components compare portions of images to create points, which are then compared to convert the image into a model. Users are able to view and generate their own models using a software tool available for download at the Photosynth website.

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CleVR is a free panoramic photo sharing site and photo stitching software. It allows panoramas to be embedded into other web pages using a Flash viewer. Panoramas can be displayed with hotspots — areas in the scene that can be clicked to display other content or to navigate to another scene. This functionality is similar to that provided by Apple's QuickTime VR, but it allows images, text and Flash Video (FLV) video to be displayed within the panorama window.

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Boštjan Burger

Boštjan Burger is a Slovenian informatician, geographer, a panoramic and VR panoramic photographer and a speleologist. He was founder of the Burger Landmarks website and had retired as computer programmer in the 1990s to become a geographic researcher on the hydrology of waterfalls. He used VR panoramas as a tool in the research of landscapes. He was greatly influenced by geographer Don Bain for documenting the landscape with VR panoramas and Hans Nyberg for his use of QuickTime VR fullscreen panoramas.

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Cinematic virtual reality(Cine-VR) is an immersive experience where the audience can look around in 360 degrees while hearing spatialized audio specifically designed to reinforce the belief that the audience is actually in the virtual environment rather than watching it on a two-dimensional screen. Cine-VR is different from traditional Virtual Reality which uses computer generated worlds and characters more akin to interactive gaming engines, while cine-VR uses live images captured thorough a camera which makes it more like film.

References

  1. Duncan, Geoff (July 17, 1995). "QuickTime VR is Actually Real". Tidbits (286). Archived from the original on April 10, 1997.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Leswing, Kif (May 29, 2016). "The inside story of Apple's forgotten project to change how we explore the world from our computers". Business Insider. Retrieved 2022-07-17. Years before Google and Oculus started daydreaming about virtual reality, Apple already had a “VR” product on the market. Apple called it QuickTime Virtual Reality, or QuickTime VR.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "MacWorld July 1995". MacWorld . July 1995. Retrieved September 3, 2019.
  4. Elia, Eric (April 1995). "QuickTime VR Gets Surrounded". NewMedia. Archived from the original on July 13, 1997.