This implies that, from a user's perspective, QT still offers the
"best" experience for spherical panos. Is that a fair statement? I
mean, if you were going to deploy over the Web in just a single
format and wanted to offer the best user experience, would QT be the
better choice? I've tried ptViewer, and it's ok, but it doesn't seem
to have the features offered by QT.
Well, I think "best" is going to be definitely subjective.. IMO. ;-)
Possibly, as far as best quality combined with cross-platform
accessibility, QT is still "it". It's the number one choice to export
to, from within the stitching applications. You can certainly author
your pano and export it to other formats & then offer multiple
choices to your user/viewer -- though my thinking is that this only
confuses most people; a marginally better approach is to pursue
browser/app "sniffing" to see what a user has installed, and then
deliver the pano to them in a specific format.
As far as delivering (cubic) Flash panoramas to users, a la Pano2QTVR
-> FlashPack: Many, if not most, "professional" displays of panoramas
within the context of a Web site or Virtual Tour are going to _not_
employ full screen display of the VR -- rather, the panorama is sized
to fit within a site's design. At this point, especially considering
the need for cross-platform/browser accessibility coupled with what I
see as perfectly reasonable and deployable image quality (from P2Q's
Flash display), Flash should be an important contender.
There are other ways to display panoramas with "better" quality than
either QT or Flash (Shockwave, Pangaea, DevalVR, etc) but they all
suffer from a low or inconsistent install base, and many varying
degrees of functionality.
Also, despite what's on Apple's site, I can't seem to get the QT
JavaScript interface to work in most browsers - only IE on Windows
and Safari on Mac. What I've read seems to indicate it should work
with nearly every contemporary browser. :-/
I've never been able to produce consistent results across browsers
and platforms when trying to use Javascript calls to interact with QT
from a browser. This is one example of many things which appear
poorly supported, or very low on the priority list (especially for
QTVR), for Apple & the QuickTime team. For the Javascripting issue
specifically, there are many browser issues which get in the way as
well.
My 2 cents. :)
Patrick
ps:
if you go to my site at http://cheathamlane.net , then to its
gallery, you can view examples of Flash-delivered (a la FlashVR)
panoramas. These are in contrast to examples from Pano2QTVR. FWIW.
I'll be converting all my panos to cubic Flash display in the
upcoming weeks.
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