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I first saw QuickTime VR in around 1999, and was so blown away by it that I ended up building a whole business around it. I made software that stitched the imag

I first saw QuickTime VR in around 1999, and was so blown away by it that I ended up building a whole business around it. I made software that stitched the images, assembled them into a QTVR movie and let you build Streetview-type tours hosted on our servers. It was great fun, though reverse-engineering the Apple Graphics codec used for the the clickable hotspots was a bit tedious. Eventually we abandoned QTVR, as it became clear Apple had abandoned it. It was also a pain doing something that required the user to have the QuickTime plugin installed. We moved to using Flash instead, and it lives on at http://www.clevr.com/ http://www.clevr.com/ . It's pretty much abandoned now, as the state of the art in stitching is miles ahead of what it was then. I will eventually move it to use an HTML5 viewer. Amazingly there are still thousands of MAUs, despite having had virtually no updates in years.

dvdplm 10y ago
Me too! It was such amazing fun and we really believed we'd make it big time. We built "VR tours" to art cities in Italy. A few are still online: http://www.girareggio.it/ http://www.girareggio.it/ and http://www.comune.bologna.it/girabologna/ http://www.comune.bologna.it/girabologna/ and sort of kinda working. We used a Seitz Roundshot 220VR camera to take all the photos. Probably the weirdest camera I have ever used, quite special. As you say, it soon became clear that Apple was not investing any effort in QTVR (or in QT in general tbh) and I remember struggling writing a QT C-extension for our PHP-based authoring env. Good times!
- ascorbic 10y ago
  When I first started I didn't even have a digital camera. I took the photos with a film camera, had them printed, then scanned them in! Quite a contrast with shooting a panorama on my phone now.
bshimmin 10y ago
Great story! Also: I bet that domain name would be worth something to someone.

dvdplm 10y ago

Me too! It was such amazing fun and we really believed we'd make it big time. We built "VR tours" to art cities in Italy. A few are still online: http://www.girareggio.it/ http://www.girareggio.it/ and http://www.comune.bologna.it/girabologna/ http://www.comune.bologna.it/girabologna/ and sort of kinda working. We used a Seitz Roundshot 220VR camera to take all the photos. Probably the weirdest camera I have ever used, quite special. As you say, it soon became clear that Apple was not investing any effort in QTVR (or in QT in general tbh) and I remember struggling writing a QT C-extension for our PHP-based authoring env. Good times!

ascorbic 10y ago
When I first started I didn't even have a digital camera. I took the photos with a film camera, had them printed, then scanned them in! Quite a contrast with shooting a panorama on my phone now.

bshimmin 10y ago

Great story! Also: I bet that domain name would be worth something to someone.