hands on
Get Real
Michael Vallance

Virtual Reality for the rest of us.
By Michael Vallance
www.macuser.org.sg

How can travel companies let customers explore destinations from the comfort of an armchair or universities provide navigation guides for visitors? QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) Authoring Studio from Apple. Examples are online at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/gallery/

The charismatic Dennis Biela of The Way Ahead Group (www.wayaheadgroup.com) , was recently in Singapore to reveal the immense potential of QTVR for art, education and business, attended by over 300 computer users. Demonstrating the EAA Aviation Museum project (http://museum.eaa.org/), Dennis explained his work, his equipment, his customers and his company’s philosophy, “I don’t create a QuickTime VR. I create a gateway to more information.”

Let’s take Dennis’s advice and create our first information gateway using Apple’s QuickTime VR Authoring Studio, available online at Singapore’s www.asia.apple.com/applestore or from Zym (http://www.zym.net).

My first project was Singapore’s new National Institute of Education (NIE) campus.

To photograph the plaza, I first horizontally leveled my digital camera on a tripod. Attached to this tripod was a Panhead by Kaidan (www.kaidan.com) which is essential for maintaining a consistent axis of rotation of the camera and its lens. I took 18 photographs at 20 degree intervals.

I then plugged the camera into my PowerBook and downloaded the JPEG images to a new folder. Each image size was 320 x 240.

I opened QTVR Authoring Studio and selected New Panorama Stitcher and selected Add Images.

PICTURE 1: Panorama stitcher

I then clicked Stitch Panorama and sat back in awe as my Apple PowerBook went to work.

PICTURE 2: NIE panorama

Selecting New Scene Maker I dragged the completed Pano files into the Scene. I then selected the navigation link arrows. Clicking on NIE1 pano while holding down the option key brought up an Edit Hot Spot command which allowed me to select an area on my panorama which, when clicked, would link to a selected area in the NIEfront pano. I even added a web page link such as the English Language and Literature web site (www.arts.nie.edu.sg/ell/home.html) at a selected area within my panorama.

PICTURE 3: Scene Maker

With all these linked together, I selected Make Scene and saved the .MOV file.
Finally, I needed to embed the whole tour as a QuickTime file into a web page using the HTML command.
<embed src="niesmall.mov" width="340" height="260"> </embed>

The Virtual Tour is at www.arts.nie.edu.sg/ell/vallance/quicktime/QTVR.html

Michael Vallance is from the Mac Users Group of Sing-apore. Its website is at www.macuser.org.sg