Glenn M. Picher: QuickTime VR

The Church of San Miniato: Florence, Italy

Apple's QuickTime Virtual Reality technology lets you explore a virtual space on any PC or Mac without special hardware. This QuickTime VR scene of the Church of San Miniato in Florence, Italy was produced from 12 frames of 35mm slide film taken by Dana Hutchins of Image Works (located in Portland, Maine) on a recent trip to Italy. I consulted with Image Works to create these QuickTime VR panoramas using Apple's QuickTime VR Toolkit, and handled QTVR interface coding in Macromedia Director for Mac and Windows. These files are the raw QTVR scene without the Director interface "wrapper".

To view these scenes, download the QuickTime VR player application from Apple. Choose either the Mac or Windows version. Then, when you've properly configured the player (following Apple's further instructions there), you'll be able to view this scene.

Apple also has released Netscape plug-in versions of the QTVR playback engine for both Mac and Windows. Though you won't be able to view the movies on this page directly with the plug-in (because the movies are in .zip and .sit archives here), you could download the file and drag it onto the Netscape icon or a Netscape browser window.

The same QTVR .mov files will work on both platforms. However, I've stored the files in two formats: .zip and .sit.hqx . Download this low-res .sit.hqx or .zip version (93K) if you only expect to view the scene on a low-horsepower machine; download this high-res .sit.hqx or .zip version (228K) if you only expect to use a high-horsepower machine; download this dual-res .sit.hqx or .zip version (318K) if you want a single, larger file that will play back optimally, no matter what horsepower CPU you're using.

These packages contain only a QTVR .mov file. Choose the most convenient format for downloading.

The .zip format is standard for PC distribution. You can uncompress these .zip files on a PC with PKZip for Windows (recommended) or for DOS (harder to use) from PKWare, or with WinZip. You can also decompress the .zip file on a Mac with UnZip or ZipIt.
The .sit.hqx format is standard for Mac distribution, and can be downloaded to either a Mac or a PC with Stuffit Expander for Mac or for Windows from Aladdin Systems.

Hopefully, storing these QTRV movies in these formats will make it accessible to most anyone anywhere, no matter how you connect to the Internet.

Glenn M. Picher: Dirigo Multimedia
Back to Glenn's home page