I first saw QuickTime VR in around 1999, and was so blown away by it that I ended up building a whole business around it. I made software that stitched the images, assembled them into a QTVR movie and let you build Streetview-type tours hosted on our servers. It was great fun, though reverse-engineering the Apple Graphics codec used for the the clickable hotspots was a bit tedious. Eventually we abandoned QTVR, as it became clear Apple had abandoned it. It was also a pain doing something that required the user to have the QuickTime plugin installed. We moved to using Flash instead, and it lives on at http://www.clevr.com/ . It's pretty much abandoned now, as the state of the art in stitching is miles ahead of what it was then. I will eventually move it to use an HTML5 viewer. Amazingly there are still thousands of MAUs, despite having had virtually no updates in years.
Me too! It was such amazing fun and we really believed we'd make it big time. We built "VR tours" to art cities in Italy. A few are still online: http://www.girareggio.it/ and http://www.comune.bologna.it/girabologna/ and sort of kinda working.
We used a Seitz Roundshot 220VR camera to take all the photos. Probably the weirdest camera I have ever used, quite special.
As you say, it soon became clear that Apple was not investing any effort in QTVR (or in QT in general tbh) and I remember struggling writing a QT C-extension for our PHP-based authoring env. Good times!
I had the Star Trek Omnipedia as a kid (actually, still do; 2 versions of it, complete with janky voice recognition), and I was embarrassingly jealous of a friend that had the Tech Manual. As far as I was concerned, he could tour around the Enterprise whenever he wanted.
I still have my Wu-Tang Forever [0] enhanced CD with the QTVR rooms. You could tell RZA really enjoyed working on the VR rooms. Based on what I know about him he is a gadget-colic.
Quicktime VR found its niche later on. There were camera attachments for 360 lens "simulations" where you could shoot a scene and have it in QTVR. There were postcards (physical with CDs) with those.
I remember this though https://vimeo.com/97806117 which was more of a VR. We even had stereo glasses on workstations. There was also IO Glasses, later on, for PCs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbNUIwi5F6g This was more like VR, not like QTVR. It gave you a dizzy spell and/or a headache after 15 minutes or so. It was worth it when playing Dark Forces with it though.
edit: I just remembered. IO Glasses cost somewhere about 1600 Deutsche Mark (around 800 Euros) and thing sucked, but not by much. I might still have them somewhere!
I spent a lot of time in late 99-2001 playing around with some of the prototypes IPIX was working on at the time. They had some of the best 360 stitched photography i'd ever seen, they'd built a quasi in-expensive adaptor for the Nikon cameras (The model that twisted in the middle), and were prototyping some really awesome 360 video tech. I think the best video I saw was a prototype helmet they'd put on users, allowing them to see stitched 360 footage from the perspective of a motorcycle riding through the Appalachians.
It makes me wonder how things would have turned out if a few of those companies had worked together rather than individually trying to solve the same problems.
In 1996-97 I was working at an anthropology center in Thailand. I was using quicktime VR to capture the interiors Thai temples and cultural heritage objects in 3d. We used a gigantic pivoting rig for the large objects.
This was all on film cameras (nikons). We had film scanners (and film printers for creating presentations), the works (a special tripod head was used for the interior shots).
This was back when you had to use MPW (mac programmers workbench) to do the actual stitching.
I'm sure all those photos are sitting in some government office still (or maybe in that center) and could even be reprocessed today, in a MUCH easier manner.
All I remember is the spammy nag screens every time it was updated: "Why not buy Quicktime Pro?" and Apple's hideous brushed steel UI which often didn't quiet render correctly.
Played around with panoramic QuickTime circa 2001-2002, after I got my first iBook. QuickTime was great on Mac, but man, (perhaps unless you spent a lot of money on photo-editing software) stitching those photos together was a bear.
I didn't forget it, I just never associated it with VR as VR glasses were prohibitively expensive and practically dead in consumer entertainment at that point.
I recall seeing it on a few websites back in the day but the loading times were bad and the plugin was horrible (as plugins tend to be). The drawbacks didn't outweigh the gimmicky benefits of having 360° photos.
Impressively stitched together, specially for the time. Even in 2008 it was a big effort to do it well in hugin. Photoshop also later improved their stitching tech and Microsoft research made ICE which was also nice.
In the demo, the ball of his mouse gets sticky.
No amount of nostalgia can make ball mice look good.
There was a brief time when QuickTime VR and photo stitching were considered essential skills for anyone getting into digital media.
The use cases for it in web projects turned out pretty limited after the novelty wore off though. Quickly narrowed down to mostly real estate and automotive demos. But some companies in manufacturing and science I think really relied on the tech in their digital sales materials for a long time.
There were some interesting games that used it. I think the 3rd Journeyman Project used either QTVR or some other similar technology. And didn't the Myst series eventually switch to something like that in later games?
Eric Chen, mentioned in the article is now working on his own VR startup Bellus3D. http://bellus3d.com I worked there for a minute. Really cool stuff they are doing.
I had a job producing QTVR back in the day and there wasn't even a GUI to do the stitching at first, you had to use a program written in some Mac development environment (can't remember its name) and it was always crashing
[+] [-] ascorbic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvdplm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bshimmin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlob|9 years ago|reply
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Gener...
FWIW the article claims that QuickTime VR was unveiled in 1995, but it was actually 1994.
[+] [-] khedoros|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haikuginger|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yardie|9 years ago|reply
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu-Tang_Forever
[+] [-] Keyframe|9 years ago|reply
I remember this though https://vimeo.com/97806117 which was more of a VR. We even had stereo glasses on workstations. There was also IO Glasses, later on, for PCs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbNUIwi5F6g This was more like VR, not like QTVR. It gave you a dizzy spell and/or a headache after 15 minutes or so. It was worth it when playing Dark Forces with it though.
edit: I just remembered. IO Glasses cost somewhere about 1600 Deutsche Mark (around 800 Euros) and thing sucked, but not by much. I might still have them somewhere!
[+] [-] buttcoin|9 years ago|reply
It makes me wonder how things would have turned out if a few of those companies had worked together rather than individually trying to solve the same problems.
[+] [-] agumonkey|9 years ago|reply
very historical
[+] [-] Adaptive|9 years ago|reply
This was all on film cameras (nikons). We had film scanners (and film printers for creating presentations), the works (a special tripod head was used for the interior shots).
This was back when you had to use MPW (mac programmers workbench) to do the actual stitching.
I'm sure all those photos are sitting in some government office still (or maybe in that center) and could even be reprocessed today, in a MUCH easier manner.
[+] [-] NTripleOne|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nasduia|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azinman2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abruzzi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panglott|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yardie|9 years ago|reply
To most people $800 Photoshop was the only hammer they knew.
[+] [-] pluma|9 years ago|reply
I recall seeing it on a few websites back in the day but the loading times were bad and the plugin was horrible (as plugins tend to be). The drawbacks didn't outweigh the gimmicky benefits of having 360° photos.
[+] [-] mxfh|9 years ago|reply
It's a misnomer in my opinion. So says Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_VR
[+] [-] ino|9 years ago|reply
In the demo, the ball of his mouse gets sticky. No amount of nostalgia can make ball mice look good.
[+] [-] aaronwidd|9 years ago|reply
The use cases for it in web projects turned out pretty limited after the novelty wore off though. Quickly narrowed down to mostly real estate and automotive demos. But some companies in manufacturing and science I think really relied on the tech in their digital sales materials for a long time.
[+] [-] vitd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrowley|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zcmncbv|9 years ago|reply