Fri - June 27, 2003

Sing Ho! Sing Ho! A new Toy! er...um...I mean Tool!



A 360 degree panoramic view of Brooks ' Mason Street Studios

Okay, QTVR (aka Quick Time Virtual Reality) has been around for a while. I was really into it when it first came out. It was cool but rather cumbersome. You shot a series of 12-18 images in a circle around you trying to overlap each image 30-50%. You the got the film developed, scanned onto CD, and then stitched them together produced a movie in which you could "look around" the scene by dragging you mouse back and forth. Cool, right? Pain in the ass and expensive? Yep.

Digital cameras eliminated most of the expense but didn't do much to eliminate the "pain-in-the-ass" factor and I quit doing them.

That gentle reader has now changed. Enter the Eye-See 360 . This cool little gadget is a concave mirror on bracket that you attach to a digital camera. Since the mirror sees the entire scene, you get everything in one shot. You then open the image on your computer and the software unwarps it and makes the movie in a couple of clicks of the mouse. Brilliant!

Now I can make QTVRs fairly quickly and shoot scenes containing moving objects. Something that was difficult or impossible in the past. Granted they don't give the mirror rig away but my first job with it paid for it. I was assigned to shoot VRs of the Brooks campus for their new website that is under construction. One of the first VRs I made was of the Mason Street Studios.

You can look forward to (or dread) seeing more in the coming weeks.

Posted: 02:15 PM   Home    

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