QuickTime is Apple Computer's powerful multi-media software technology. It consists of a group of system software extensions that enable Macintosh and Wintel computers to work with time - based media ...video, sound, 3D animation and includes a set of Virtual Reality components called QuickTime VR Panoramas and QuickTime VR Objects.

Included with the QuickTime 3.0 software, is the QuickTime plug-in 2.0, for your browser's plug-in folder.
These are the latest versions for both Windows and Mac OS: January 1998

QuickTime VR (QTVR) panoramic images are created by placing a conventional camera on a tripod and shooting photos at equal angles as it is panned through 360 degrees. Using software such as Apple Computer's QTVR Authoring Studio, the resulting photos (between 10 and 36 in number) are "warped and stitched" together seamlessly and turned into a QTVR pano "movie".

When you click inside the QTVR movie window and move the cursor around, the scene moves in the direction of the mouse movement, as if you were standing in one spot and looking around! You can also zoom in to get a closer view of the scene, or zoom out to get a wider perspective.

Clickable hotspots can be added to the pano that perform various actions when you click on them, such as going to another pano movie, displaying text, playing a sound or movie, or displaying a QTVR object.

The spinning Thumbnails on the VR content pages are animated Gif files that step through the scene like a flip book giving you a quick preview.

You're probably wondering why things may look jaggy and generally mushy! Do I use plastic lenses???
As a professional photographer, this is a constant irritation and concern. Showing you fuzzy images is not
going to build confidence in what I can do for you using this technology! Here is an explanation:

There's a big difference in the image quality (detail and resolution) between QuickTime movies that work well over the Internet and QuickTime movies that can be presented from CD-ROMs. Most people have 14.4 or 28.8 modem links to the Internet like myself. A 28.8 modem can download a movie file at about 2.5 KBytes per second maximum.

All of the QTVR movies presented here were rebuilt in VR 2.0 movie format and to be smaller from their original files. They were aggressively compressed for internet bandwidth, and are considered lower in resolution. These files range from 110K to 215K in size and will take about a minute or two to download at best. At your request, I''ll post higher resolution movies for those who have faster connections to the internet .

The QTVR movie file format has two flavors: Version 1.0 movie format is old but most compatible with Macs and Wintel PCs loaded with older QuickTime 2.5 and Browser Plug-in 1.0 software. Version 2.0 movie format is the latest and really rocks with QuickTime 3.0 with the Browser Plug-in 2.0 . Whew, you got that?

With the latest QuickTime software, QTVR 2.0 format movies have a nice fast start / data streaming feature that gives you interactivity with the movie almost immediately as sections of the movie continues to come in! Cool.

The official information from Apple Computer can be found at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/