landscapes

(Please see the technical notes below if you have difficulties.)

Multi-row Panoramas (Cubic)

This type of panorama actually allows you to view not only a 360-degree horizontal field of view (like the single-row panoramas below) but also a 180-degree vertical field of view. Which means you can tilt all the way up and all the way down. A small gap is blocked out at the bottom where the tripod was sitting. They are called "cubic" because they are actually rendered as six inside-faces of a cube each offering a view 90-degrees from it's neighbor. The viewer "warps" the faces mathematically into a seamless scene.

19th Century Grave Site: Scene #1 [ 1,000K QT | 576K Java ]	19th Century Grave Site: Scene #2 [ 842K QT | 536K Java ]

Single-row Panoramas

Single-row panoramas offer a 360-degree horizontal field of view and a more limited vertical field of view. In this case, about 60 degrees. From a technical standpoint, they are much quicker to make than the multi-row panos above.

The Country Club Plaza [ 800K QT | 180K Java ]	Grand Canyon [ 1,800K QT | 568K Java ]
Little Colorado River Gorge [ 1,600K QT | 340K Java ]	Meteor Crater [ 1,800K QT | 376K Java ]
Missouri Hiway "C" [ 3,100K QT | 548K Java ]	Lake Perry [ 2,900K QT | 652K Java ]
Plaza - Walking Bridge [ 1,100K QT | 276K Java ]	Plaza - Ward Parkway [ 820K QT | 156K Java ]
Plaza - Wornall Road [ 1,600K QT | 272K Java ]

Technical notes: The VR galleries contains items that, in most cases, can be viewed with either the QuickTime (QT) plugin or a Java applet. The virtual tour is only available at this time in QuickTime. The Java versions are normally much smaller than their QT counterparts and do not require you to install a plugin. All modern browsers include support for Java. (However, Java must be enabled in your browser settings. This is the default for most browsers.) The first panorama you choose to download will take a few seconds longer to appear as the viewer applet must also be downloaded.

The Java panos are not generally as high quality as their QT counterparts. The wider variety of compression methods available in QT is part of the reason. The other is that the panos must be smaller as the Java Applet doesn't seem to work as reliably as QT for large file sizes. They are kept small so that they show up.

All sizes are in K (thousands of bytes). A 56K modem will download about 7,000 bytes/second so a 280K pano would take about 40 seconds to show up. The QT panos are only recommended if you have a broadband connection (cable/DSL) or lots of time on your hands.

If you're using a Mac, I have noticed that Java in general and the pano viewer specifically runs VERY slow under Mac OS X 10.2.x (Java 1.4.1). To further complicate things, if you are using the Safari browser (still at 1.0 Beta 2 v73 as of this writing), the applet sometimes stops working. I hope to have some lower resolution QT versions available before too long for those not on broadband and having Java problems. Java under MacOS 9.x at least with Netscape 4.7 seems to work fine as does Java on WinTel boxes using Netscape and Internet Explorer.

Netscape 4.7 on WinTel does not appear to clean up after itself. The viewing applet runs out of memory. The only fix I've been able to come up with is shutting down the browser and starting it up again.

QuickTime 5 does not seem to totally enjoy the cubic panoramas -- that was the first version of QT to support cubic panos. I have noticed this on Windows 2000 using both Netscape 4.7 and IE 6. There are pieces of the pano missing and pieces show up in the wrong place. Sometimes, reloading the pano clears up the problem. You might also consider upgrading your plugin.