Christopher Mackay’s Blog

Today, in response to a complaint on the QuickTime VR mailing list, I’ve posted an entry on QuickTime VR on Wikipedia. Previously, the entire entry consisted of a link to the QuickTime page.

QuickTime VR (virtual reality) is one of many capabilities of Apple’s QuickTime multimedia software, which operates as a stand-alone player for Macintosh and Windows PCs, as well as a web-browser plug-in.

There are two main types of QuickTime VR files:

1. Panoramas
2. Objects

VR Panormas are typically 360-degree photographs (3D-modelled scenes) which allow the user to look all around a certain location and, in the case of cubic panoramas, all the way up and down, too. These photos — sometimes called nodes — may be stitched together from a number of photographs (anywhere from 2 to 20 or more), and multiple nodes can be connected to form a scene..

Object VRs allow the user to rotate or otherwise manipulate a virtual object — again, photographic or 3D-modelled — by clicking and dragging on it. Single-row objects allow rotation along a single axis, and can have quite small filesizes. Multi-row objects may allow the user to see the top and bottom of the object, but will result in proportionately larger files.

It’s not perfect, but hopefully it will be improved upon, by someone else if not by me.

Apple recently announced a series of updates. The most widely-anticipated was the Motorola/Apple/Cingular iTunes phone. To call it hideous is an injustice to all self-respecting things hideous. Still, it’s a toe-hold in a new market, and it stakes out some small territory. More will follow. Enough about that.

QuickTime 7.0.2 was released, marking the first full release of QuickTime 7 for Windows, and the quashing of some QuickTime Player Pro bugs that were of particular interest to QuickTime VR authors like myself. Kudos to the QuickTime team.

iTunes 5 is also fun. John Gruber has a hilarious take on the app’s appearance, in which he correctly identifies himself as an Apple interface zealot. He’s not wrong, but he is amusing. Visit his site. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The new iPod nano looks brilliant. The black version is the one to get. The lanyard headphones option is very cool. It’s almost enough to make me wish I didn’t have a 20 GB click-wheel iPod. Almost.

Oh, and you can now buy all of Madonna’s music — on a song-by-song basis, no less — via iTunes. I’d make some snide remark about how no self-respecting Pink Floyd fan would ever listen to Madonna if it weren’t for the fact that I bought two of her tunes…

But where’s the iPod video? Either there’s going to be another announcement soon, or Robert Cringely’s predictions vis-a-vis an iTunes video store aren’t quite on the mark.

One of the notable updates that came with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was QuickTime 7. It offers significant improvements by way of H.264, a codec that offers radically-improved video quality at lower data-rates than Sorenson 3, the old stand-by that’s getting, well, old.

However:

• Some editing functionality in the Pro version doesn’t work. This seems to be a result of bugs in QuickTime Player.app, as opposed to QuickTime itself, as using a copy of QuickTime Player 6.5 restores this functionality.
• Multi-node QuickTime VR panoramas still function properly, unless you need to be able to tell where hotspots (links between nodes) are. Then you have to rely on clairvoyance.
• While most of the bugs primarily affect QuickTime Player (as opposed to the arguably more-important browser plug-in) and are mostly related to authoring functions rather than playback issues, few (if any) of them were addressed by the recent release of QuickTime 7.0.1. This release seems aimed more at users of Final Cut Pro.
• There’s still no sign of QuickTime 7 for Windows. Normally this would be quite annoying, but with these outstanding bugs, this is a good thing.

Roger Howard has been kind enough to post an AppleScript to the QuickTime VR mailing list that will prove truly useful to QuickTime VR authors like myself. With his permission, I’m linking to it. Says Roger:

“If you do manual blending a lot like I do, you’ll find that as you complete your work you still have to deal with blending across the edges of the document - this means somehow offsetting and wrapping each layer by some fixed distance so you can see where the left/right edges of the document meet. This script will automate offsetting all of the visible layers (and their associated layer masks) in the current document in Photoshop. The offset is exactly half of the width of the document, so the former left/right edges will now meet in the center of the image.

I run this script once, blend the edge seam, and then run it again to restore the document to its original orientation.

Notes:

1. this only works on visible layers, invisible layers will be untouched so do not make a layer visible between runs or you will not have your document properly restored to its original layout.
2. make sure you do not have a non-image layer selected before running this, or the first offset will be wrong. To make sure, simply click the proxy icon of an image layer before running. I’m sure I could fix this in the script, but I’ve just gotten used to it.

http://homepage.mac.com/rogerhoward/.Public/OffsetAllLayers.zip

Thanks to Roger for sharing this.

I think it would be great for Adobe to add this feature to Photoshop; the ability to scroll the contents of a Photoshop document independently of the window. The edges would be ’soft’, like they were in Asteroids, the early Atari video game. The left edge leads directly to the right edge. Obviously, this would interfere with the “big data” metaphor, but it would be a useful option that would greatly simplify the process of creating seamless panoramic images.

Those making cubic QuickTime VR images would use it, but there aren’t likely enough of us to get Adobe’s attention. Another, overlapping group would include special effects studios like Industrial Light & Magic, who use technologies like QuickTime VR photographs as environment maps in their 3D-modeled objects & environments. Since John Knoll (co-creator, with his brother Thomas, of Photoshop) is one such person, maybe there’s a chance?