QuickTime VR (also known as QTVR) is an image file format developed by
Apple Inc.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...
for
QuickTime, and discontinued along with QuickTime 7. It allows the creation and viewing of
VR photography
VR photography (after virtual-reality photography) is the interactive viewing of panoramic photographs, generally encompassing a 360-degree circle or a spherical view. The results is known as VR photograph (or VR photo), 360-degree photo, phot ...
, photographically captured
panoramas, and the viewing of objects photographed from multiple angles. It functions as
plugins for the QuickTime Player and for the QuickTime
Web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...
plugin.
History
QuickTime VR was conceived in 1991 by programmers Eric Chen and Ian Small of the Human Interface Group in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple, utilizing a Cray supercomputer to process images into panoramas. It was soon made prominent within the company by Apple's board member and former astronaut
Sally Ride
Sally Kristen Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012) was an American astronaut and physicist. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the first American woman and the third woman to fly in space, after cosmonauts ...
, who was fascinated by the demonstrated possibilities of 3D computer imagery.
It was publicly launched in 1995 as part of
QuickTime 2, by a dedicated group including Chen, Small, senior content engineer Ted Casey, and program manager Eric Zarakov.
Apple sold the content authoring tools for plus a $0.40-$0.80 royalty fee per commercial CD-ROM disc depending on the number of QuickTime VR movies, or no royalty charge for non-commercial usage.
Upon launch, it was used as supporting technology in digital publications such as the ''Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual''.
The first high-profile public application of QuickTime VR is the 1995 courtroom visualization of the crime scenes in the
O. J. Simpson murder case
''The People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson'' was a criminal trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court starting in 1994, in which O. J. Simpson, a former National Football League (NFL) player, broadcaster and actor, was ...
.
The platform was deemphasized upon the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in 1997.
The discontinuation of
QuickTime 7 in the late 2000s brought the end of development and support of QuickTime VR and other major technologies.
Overview
Panoramas
Panoramas are panoramic images which surround the viewer with an environment (inside, looking out), yielding a sense of place.
They can be stitched together from several normal photographs or 2 images taken with a circular
fisheye lens
A fisheye lens is an ultra wide-angle lens that produces strong visual distortion intended to create a wide panoramic or hemispherical image. Fisheye lenses achieve extremely wide angles of view, well beyond any rectilinear lens. Instead of p ...
, or captured with specialized panoramic cameras, or rendered from 3D-modeled scenes.
There are two types of panoramas:
* Single row panoramas, with a single horizontal row of photographs.
* Multi-row panoramas, with several rows of photographs taken at different tilt angles.
Panoramas are further divided into those that include the top and bottom, called cubic or spherical panoramas, and those that do not, usually called cylindrical.
A single panorama, or node, is captured from a single point in space. Several nodes and object movies can be linked together to allow a viewer to move from one location to another. Such multinode QuickTime VR movies are called scenes.
Apple's QuickTime VR file format has two representations for panoramic nodes:
* cylindrical, consisting of one 360° image wrapped around the viewer
* cubic, consisting of a
cube of six 90° × 90° images surrounding the viewer.
Each of these are typically subdivided or tiled into several smaller images, and stored in a special kind of QuickTime movie file, which requires the QuickTime plugin.
Hot spots can be embedded into the panorama, which when selected can invoke some action, for example moving to another panorama node.
Objects
In contrast to panoramas, which are captured from one location looking out at various angles, objects are captured from many locations pointing in toward the same central object.
The simplest type of objects to capture are single row, typically captured around the equator of an object. This is normally facilitated by a rotating turntable. The object is placed on the turntable, and photographed at equal angular increments (usually 10°) from a camera mounted on a
tripod
A tripod is a portable three-legged frame or stand, used as a platform for supporting the weight and maintaining the stability of some other object. The three-legged (triangular stance) design provides good stability against gravitational loads ...
.
Capturing a multi-row object movie requires a more elaborate setup for capturing images, because the camera must be tilted above and below the equator of the object at several tilt angles.
The image source does not have to be photographic. 3D renderings or drawings can be used.
Reception
In 1995, ''
MacWorld'' cited some pioneering multimedia developers with a shared viewpoint fanatically in favor of QuickTime VR technology but against Apple's $0.40-$0.80 royalty fee per commercial CD-ROM unit plus fee for authoring tools, and some halting their existing efforts in protest. The magazine's exhaustive overview concluded with this: "QuickTime VR is an impressive achievement that reinforces Apple's role as the innovator in personal computer multimedia. But Apple's zeal to turn QuickTime VR into a profit center may slow its initial adoption and perhaps even relegate it to the backseat of Microsoft's limousine. As this issue went to press, Apple was reconsidering its requirement that developers pay royalties on titles that incorporate QuickTime VR. As well it should."
Legacy
In 2016, ''
Business Insider
''Insider'', previously named ''Business Insider'' (''BI''), is an American financial and business news website founded in 2007. Since 2015, a majority stake in ''Business Insider''s parent company Insider Inc. has been owned by the German pub ...
'' reflected on the long-term impact of QuickTime VR: "It's difficult not to read about Apple's experiments with panoramic images and not draw a connection to the recent rise of 360-degree videos on platforms like
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...
and
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
— or even the immersive aspects of services like
Google Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...
Street View. Much of what's called VR these days isn't a full interactive environment, but is instead a descendant of the panoramic images that Apple pioneered."
See also
*
Free viewpoint television
Free viewpoint television (FTV) is a system for viewing natural video, allowing the user to interactively control the viewpoint and generate new views of a dynamic scene from any 3D position.
The equivalent system for computer-simulated video is ...
*
Panoramic photography
Panoramic photography is a technique of photography, using specialized equipment or software, that captures images with horizontally elongated fields of view. It is sometimes known as ''wide format photography''. The term has also been applied to ...
*
QuickTime
*
Virtual tour
A virtual tour is a simulation of an existing location, usually composed of a sequence of videos, still images or 360-degree images. It may also use other multimedia elements such as sound effects, music, narration, text and floor map. It is dis ...
*
VR photo
VR photography (after virtual-reality photography) is the interactive viewing of panoramic photographs, generally encompassing a 360-degree circle or a spherical view. The results is known as VR photograph (or VR photo), 360-degree photo, photo ...
*
Photosynth
Photosynth is a discontinued app and service from Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington that analyzes digital photographs and generates a three-dimensional model of the photos and a point cloud of a photographed object. Pattern r ...
References
*
External links
* ()
QuickTime VR (Apple Retired Documents Library)*
*
FreePV - Opensource panorama viewer
{{Graphics file formats
VR
Graphics file formats
Panorama software
Virtual reality
Photo software
Photo stitching software
3D graphics software