3D/Virtual Reality Projects for the Macintosh

QuickTime the answer?

[EliteWeb]

I will be doing one of those virtual tours but I'd like to compose it on my Macintosh. Has anyone had any luck creating them, QuickTimeVR the answer to this project? Thanks for the help in advanced.

[Macguru]

I did a couple of those virtual tours for Real Estate sites. I did not edit the VR myself. I left that to the specialist. We had a regular still photographer to produce catalog quality pictures for all the houses and a panoramic specialist for high end products only. The later was working in semi ambiant light to avoid shadows and flares. Pictures for panoramas look 'flatter' than well lit stills.

We worried about the QT plug-in dependance of panoramas so we decided to make them available as Java Applets too. The panoramic specialist used a freeware to edit the Java films. He could not make them as good as with the QT format. Users had less control over the film and we could not use 'hotspots' to move from room to room.

Here are the stats : about 62 % of visitors used the panoramas. Taking them aside, 55 % used the Java applet version instead of the QT panorama. So the plug-in dependency is really an issue. For those who used the QT format only 35 % of them used the advanced features such as hot spots. Even if we wrote little explanations on how to use it, in plain text, under the movies. We had to provide HTML links under the movie afterwards, because most users did not know how to navigate whitin hot spots.

Conclusion : QT defitely let you produce high end panoramas filled with features, but end users don't know how to benefit from them.

[TallTroll]

There are Virtual Tour packages that you can compose on a Mac, and churn out Java images. I've stickied you some details