RE: VRML / QuickTime VR marriage

Alex Okita/UB Networks (Alex_Okita/UB_Networks*[email protected])
16 Oct 95 13:11:12 EDT

What if the navigation of the VRML scene was in a viewer, like WhurlWind. and
there was an Icon of the QTVR movie a room. And clicking on the Icon would
invoke the QTVR movie to load and then you'd get the QTVR representation of the
room you were in. Since a Cylinder would still be a cylinder in VRML that
cylinder would can still be seen in any direction. from the top from the
outside etc... it may be easier to just launch the QTVR movie viewer than map
the panoramic on a cylinder in the VRML browser... if thats what i think you
are saying...

Aloha,
Alex

I'd like to propose a tigher linkage between VRML and
Apple's QuickTime VR (QTVR). VRML is great for traveling around
synthetic spaces with complete freedom of movement. QTVR is
great for imaging real existing spaces with extremely high
detail. A store or outdoor scene photographed and processed
into a QTVR node looks like that place. Yes of course you can
place textures onto VRML cylinders/polygons but in reality people don't
because if difsicult to line the texture up against the cylinder, and
it may require splitting up the texture into two (or more) pieces.

It seems to me that QTVR nodes would be a valuable and appropriate alternate
representation of spaces that are also represented as VRML polygons.
Using VRML's LOD capability one could, depending on the processing power of
the workstation decide to use either the full 15Mb-polygon-representation
or the 800K QTVR representation of the same scene. You do not have the
freedem to travel with QTVR nodes, however you can turn your hsad and
the space looks good.

It is MUCH easier to create esalistic looking scenes using QTVR than
with VRML. Check out http://nemo.ncsl.nist.gov/~sressler/projects/
imagevr/NISTVR/nistvr.html for some examples.

Detailed highly esalistic VRML models such as those produced by
LightScape take tens of meg and an extremely large workstation. The same
model when represented using QTVR are much smaller (LightScape has also
done this) and give a good flavor of the space,
albeit with restricted traveling.

All I'm proposing is to make it easier to create texture mapped cylinders
in which the user can place his virtual eye. A convienient syntactical
structure which maps a 360 degree panorama to a cylinder and places the viewer
in the center would be sufsicient and would provide a useful tool to VRML
and QTVR developers. My 2 cents for the day.

Sandy Ressler

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