Creating a "Virtual Tour" on the Web?

MadCow42 asks: "Back in 1996, I created a point-and-click Virtual Tour of my apartment, and updated it a few times over the years. I ended up with 180 separate hand-written HTML pages, and a pretty cool tour, which won many web awards. The problem is, hand-coded individual pages are not very efficient (or exciting) way to present such a thing, today. When I started out, it was pretty unique and exciting, but now I'd like to create a new tour that is much more dynamic and 'fluid'. Having my own webserver, I am thinking of doing it mostly through Perl CGI scripting and a database. Are there any 'Virtual Tour Toolkits' out there? If I created one, would others be interested in it? I'd hate to reinvent the wheel, but if I do, I'd like any feedback as to how to most efficiently design for such a 'walk-through' system so that it is quick and complete."

Sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Use VIRTUAL::TOUR available at CPAN. You'll need to grok the most arcane regex usage and howl at the moon, but it should work. Not.

Nope, you are not going to find a toolkit. You've done it by hand once. Sit your ass down and figure out on paper and implement it.

Re:Tour software, Guide to panoramas

[armb]

> lines of http://www.house.co.uk

Damn, that should have been http://www.ehouse.co.uk

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Tour software, Guide to panoramas

[armb]

I was recently looking for stuff along the lines of http://www.house.co.uk
Have a look at http://www.panoguide.com/, especially http://www.panoguide.com/software/compare_world.ht ml

Those are non-free tools, but there is PanoTools http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/ "Software to View, Create, Edit and Remap Panoramic Images", which includes a GIMP plugin.
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Here is what you want...

[cr0sh]

It is called Freedom VR - two versions are available, one written in Java, and a new Alpha version written in Javascript. The Java version has more features, but the Javascript version is faster, and best of all, GPL'd (and I would bet the features would be dead easy to add):

Freedom VR [honeylocust.com]

On a similar vein as what you have already tried, check out the Badtech Office Tour [badtech.com]...

Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!

Of the technologies I know of...

[nick_davison]

There seem to be three basic approaches to creating a 3D walkthrough.

1. Create a huge series of linked images.
2. Create a 360 degree panorama and use a plug in that allows you to pan around it/interact with it.
3. Build a 3D model and display it via some other means such as a plug in or separate viewer.

I've used all three methods to varying degrees of success. I'll explain what the strengths and weaknesses of each one are:

1. Swapping in and out a large number of images involves sending a large number of images. Every time you want a slight update you end up having to send a new image over the web which brings lag, download times and everything else in to play. You will also only ever be able to view it from wherever the designer set viewpoints. The positive side is it's compatable with pretty much every browser out there if you can write good HTML (use a script to generate each individual page out of a database/data file with all the details in).
2. Products such as QuickTime VR allow you to stitch panoramas together, add hotspots and so on. As with the first solution, they are a predefined set of images so you can only view from the points that were originally considered.

   You also have a fun time trying to create a good panorama image. Taking a lot of pictures and stitching them together brings out issues with the lens and you get distortions which you can only really minimise by taking a lot of pictures at small angle intervals and only using the center slivers - which creates a lot of work. There are 360 degree cameras out there but they're probably a lot more expensive than you're looking to use.

3. Building a 3D model allows users to move around freely. If they want to look at the back of your wardrobe while standing on the back of your couch, that's up to them. With most systems you get to add a degree of interactivity as well so you can simulate lights being turned on and off, drawers opening, etc.

   If you have access to decent modelling packages where you can do something with the data they generate, there are more and more packages available that will take two or more photos and determine 3D data, even texturing the meshes for you, which will take a lot of the hassle out of the modelling if you're not in to that. They're not perfectly accurate but they can produce very good results.

   The big downside of a 3D model is it requires some means to view it. VRML and superscape are two of the most common browser plug in options but browser plug ins tend to be designed for genericity, are slow, hard to navigate in and generally look pretty bad. The other alternative is to create a file that has to be opened outside of the browser in something that's capable of displaying high quality images. Creating a Quake 3 model of your house may sound like a gamers passtime but it's been used by everyone from them through to architects since Doom editors became common.

   The final downside of this approach is that you are building a virtual model. Even with photomapped textures (which VRML handles horribly) it will always be a model not a genuine photo that people instill as much belief as they do in a photo.

In conclusion, there's not really a good solution to all of the issues.

• If you want true platform independence take 1.
• If you want reasonable platform independance, good quality but limited views and would rather get your hands dirty with image manipulation than 3D modelling, choose 2.
• If you want to give the user complete freedom to explore though they'll possibly attribute less belief to what they see, are prepared to spend the time modelling in 3D and don't mind that only those people with the right renderer will gain access, choose 3.

Once you've made that decision then you get to choose which of the competing packages for that option you wish to use.

immersive immaging alternatives

[nategasser]

I agree QTVR is a great way to do virtual tours. The latest QTVR from Apple does 360x360 scenes like ipix but without the insulting license terms Ipix imposes (you must pay them for every single scene you produce!)

Alternatively, check out the open source Panorama Tools [fh-furtwangen.de] which can produce standard "cylinder" panoramas, or 360x360 scenes, and play back in a variety of plugins and java applets.

Re:Of the technologies I know of...

[MadCow42]

Great overview... I've had experience with your #1 suggestion (see my page from the original story), and it worked fairly well.

#2 is a little limited for what I wanted to do, but I might actually combine this with #1 in places it makes sense.

#3 scares the heck out of me, and doesn't really suit my needs anyways... I want to show a REAL environment.

Out of all the suggestions, there's some cool stuff, but unfortunately it doesn't look like much that is suited for "exactly" what I want... I guess I'm in for a few "all-nighter" Perl programming sessions, aren't I? q:]

Keep the suggestions rolling... although I'm gonna start working on the Perl scripting and Database design (just through DBD::CSV for now). If anyone's interested in something similar, let me know and I'll post the Perl scripts after it's done and tested.

Thanks everyone!

MadCow.

well....

[ConsumedByTV]

I think QTVR is a good way to do it.

Just use hot spots to link different movies together. QTVR isnt open but its the best option to do it with out using some hand written java applet. I am also partial to never using java for anything... Any one else?


Are you on the Sfglj [sfgoth.com] (SF-Goth EMail Junkies List) ?

Try PhotoVista(formerly LivePicture) from MGI Soft

[smirking]

Hey Cliff,

If you're not against using Java in your virtual tour, I'd suggest you take a look at MGI Soft's PhotoVista Virtual Tour [mgisoft.com] product. You don't need to hand code anything, however. Their software will provide you with an HTML page with all the needed code in it for you to cut and paste into the pages (or database) that you want the tour delivered from.

I've worked on a project team that used the PhotoVista product, which seems to be a bargain at under $200, to create virtual tours of hospitals. One of the tours that we did resulted in a tour that expanded to almost 1000 rooms, which was a lot easier to do than it sounds because we were using a piece of equipment that's no longer being made (at least not to my knowledge). It was the BeHere parabolic still image lens that gave you 360 degree shots of an entire room with one shot from a standard manual camera using 35mm film.

You won't need that piece of equipment to use PhotoVista though. It comes with image stitching and optimizing software, which from what I understood from my graphics guy, was pretty decent. There are quite a few packages floating out there that do stitching and just evaluating those programs can be a task in itself without even considering the rest of the tools you'd need to publish 360 VR type of images, hotspot them, or make them "zoomable" in full detail through something like FlashPix.

If you really want to save some time and are willing to sacrifice a little bit of detail, there's another kind of lens out there that's similar to the BeHere lens that we used to use to get the whole room in one shot. Some other company has a similar kind of lens that's a lot more portable. From what I could tell of it, it was a decent piece of equipment, but I've never used it and can't vouch for how good the quality from it is. It's made by some security systems company. Anyone out there able to fill in for me the name of this company and it's parabolic lens product?

You'll no doubt also run into the name iPix, which will give you 360 x 360 virtual tour shots, which I've never been a big fan of. Those are nice for some shots and for product showcases like the inside of a car, but most of the time it's a bit disorienting and adding 360 of vertical panning compounds problems with image distortion. I'm also not a big fan of the iPix interface.