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 | real estate (Please see the technical notes below if you have difficulties.) Home Tour This is an example of a home tour. It is fairly large, but it includes ten different "nodes". Each node is a picture or a panorama of the home. It is only available in QuickTime. 
[ 1,900K QT ]
Cornerstone Mansion This B&B is in Omaha Ne. A friend of mine is one of the partners. This is a good example of interior panoramas. Most of these are long exposures (15 seconds or so). They are currently only available in QuickTime format.
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. |
