360°VR Virtual Reality Tours
Crossfade Media can produce single-shot 360°VR Panoramas. These are always a popular addition to a website, especially in the tourism and hospitality field.
Virtual Tours can be designed to include 360° panoramas, video clips, photos, text, audio, etc. either as part of a website, or on a promotional CD or DVD.
There are two ways to create a VR Panorama. The first is to take a series of images in a circle and stitch them together using special stitching software. This can result in high-resolution panoramas, however, is very time-intensive and stitching is not always 100% acurate.
The second method offered by Crossfade Media is to use a special lens attachment that allows the entire image to be captured in one shot. This is then interpreted by the software to give the panorama image. There are many advantages of this method, especially that with only one shot required, it is a lot easier to take panoramas including people and action.
A panorama shot in it's plain form looks like this (scaled down):
There are also many methods of displaying the Virtual Tour. The following is an example of using Java to view the image. The advantage of this is that it usually loads quickly and is a small file size. It is also quite flexible. The down side is that not all users will have Java support turned on automatically in their browser.
By far, the highest quality panoramas are achieved through using Apple's Quicktime, which has native support for QTVR. This provides the highest quality and flexibility for developing quality VR Virtual Tours. The down side of this is that not everyone has Quicktime installed, and so it may not be the best solution for reaching the masses. Sometimes the best solution is to offer the high-quality QTVR version of the panorama, along with an alternate version as well.
To view the QTVR version (2.5MB file) of the above panorama in a new window, Click here!
A third option for displaying the panoramas is using Flash. The advantage of this is that around 97% of people who will be looking at your site will already have the Flash plugin installed, so the image will load automatically. There is also obviously the flexibility that this then gives you in terms of other Flash components of the Virtual Tour. However... Flash was not designed to display panoramas in this way, so it takes a bit of creativity to achieve the functionality required.
There are some Flash-based VR solutions gaining wider use these days, mainly because of the reasons stated above. However, perhaps the best way to use Flash in the overall Virtual Tour is as a small preview clip that then links to a higher quality version. Below is an example of a simple Flash-based panorama. (Click in the image and drag 360°)
Panoramas used on this page are from Forest Edge (Main) and CYC The Island (Flash).
