IPIX is an imaging technology company headquartered in Cohoes, New York. It supplies hardware and software for producing, publishing, embellishing, and collaborating with
spherical imagery.
History
IPIX Corporation, successor-in-interest to Internet Pictures Corporation, Bamboo.com Inc., Omniview Inc., and TeleRobotics International, was originally an imaging technology company headquartered in
Oak Ridge, Tennessee. One of its products was visual
technology
Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, science, ...
allowing the stitching of panoramic images into 360°x 180° field of view video and photography. The company's stock was traded on
NASDAQ
The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US by volume, and ranked second ...
(IPIXQ).
Their .ipx format was for a time a widely used virtual image type for hotel and real estate websites. 'IPIX Interactive Studio', could create IPIX's proprietary format,
QuickTime
QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is avai ...
Cubic VR images, Equirectangular and Cylindrical Projections as
JPEG
JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...
s that could be viewed with
Helmut Dersch's freeware Java PTViewer, Shockwave w3d files,
VRML
VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language, pronounced ''vermal'' or by its initials, originally—before 1995—known as the Virtual Reality Markup Language) is a standard file format for representing 3-dimensional (3D) interactive vector graphi ...
files and
X3D
X3D is a royalty-free ISO/IEC standard for declaratively representing 3D computer graphics. File format support includes XML, ClassicVRML, Compressed Binary Encoding (CBE) and a draft JSON encoding. X3D became the successor to the Virtual Re ...
files. Two plug-ins are available that can create images in the RealViz format and iSeeMedia's PhotoVista format.
IPIX licensing method was as follows. The proprietary IPIX software "IPIX Wizard" could seam any number of fisheyes (or retouched fisheyes) into a .ipx and would only allow viewing of the image for quality control purposes. Users wanting to save the .ipx file would "spend" an IPIX key. These keys could be purchased from the IPIX store for $25 each, or less if purchased in bulk. Resellers could purchase these keys and offer IPIX services while charging more than $25 per sold .ipx picture. Minds-Eye-View