Other QTVR Sites

Maker of a one-shot panorama lens. Price is approximately $500 USD.

A panorama and object movie developer in Australia. They produce fashion and product object movies as well as panoramic location tours.

A Flash-based object viewer.

This is a resource site for immersive VR developers. There are also galleries of user-submitted panoramas.

3DVista's Virtual Tour Software produces Flash-based immersive VR panorama tours. Their product and services primarily target the real estate market.

Andrew Nemeng's showcase site featuring contemporary australian color photographs, 360° interactive panoramas and binaural sounds.

Romuald's tutorial for making a panorama with a spherical mirror.

The Accupan Image Capture System is designed to provide both a panoramic tripod head and a small object turntable in the same device. The system is $349 USD or $239 USD if you only want panorama functionality.

John Gaylord's Ad Image Studio produces QTVR content in the Phoenix area.

Adventure Maker is a free tool kit for developing games for the Sony Play Station Portable (PSP). It supports the creation of immersive VR panoramas.

Italian manufacturer of panoramic VR heads. These heads are available internationally in bundles from RealViz.

This site has a gallery of nice resolution cylindrical panoramas of beautiful snow-capped mountains produced by Alexandre Jenny. It is definitely worth a look. Flash is required to view the site.

All.info's Panoramic Photography section contains a vast number of links to immersive VR sites. There doesn't appear to be any particular organization to it but, there are a lot of listings.

Altostorm is commercial software to correct distortions in panoramic images (mainly partial panoramas). They offer a home user version for 69.00 USD and a professional version for 179 USD (8/2007).

3D Photo Builder is another commercial panorama stitching application.

An inexpensive (29.95 USD) manual turntable for shooting object movies.

APClean is a Windows program that can be used to quickly remove wrong control points from a PTGui project file.

Apple's QuikTime page includes links to QuickTime media (movie trailers, for example,) and to download the current version of the QuickTime plug-in (required to view QTVR movies.)

This is an ASP web-based application for creating and viewing cubic panoramas.

Some nice (cylindrical) panoramas of exotic locations (Tajmahal, St. Paul's Cathedral in London, Parliament, the Valley of the Kings, Berlin, Westminster Abbet, Piccadilly Circus, and a number of naval vessels) in both QuickTime and Java format.

Assembling QTVR Tour with Flash Navigation

Windows and Linux software that searches a folder of images and tries to group them into panoramas. It outputs Panorama Tools project files (including control points) formatted for Hugin, PTGUI, or PTAssembler. This is currently free software but, note that the University of British Columbia has applied for a patent on one of the algorithms (SIFT) and commercial use may be precluded.

Autopano Pro is a commercial version of Matthew Brown's AutoStitch software.

This page details a research project that developed basic software that recognizes and assembles panoramas from collections of images. The page is primarily a solicitation for parties interested in licensing the basic algorithm to develop a commercial product.

Mike Carambat of Design Wizardry has written a JavaScript detection system that determines the capabilities of the visitor's web browser and sends them to the best choice of viewers for a given panorama.

Website of Janie Fitzgerald, a well-known immersive VR photographer. QuickTime required.

Makers of one-shot (hemispherical mirror) attachments for Nikon digicams and full-motion DV cameras. The still lens attachments run $1,500 USD and provide 90 degrees of vertical field of view. Kaidan is a reseller.

Ben Kreunen provides excellent, highly-detailed tutorials for assembling spherical panoramas using Panorama Tools.

This site includes several Panorama Tools tutorials by Ben Kreunen, including one for determining the barrel distortion calibration parameters for a given lens.

Ed Fink's site features aerial helicopter panoramas.

A VR tour of New Mexico's Bisti Badlands from jux2position.com. The site has a painful Flash interface but, there are some interesting cylindrical panoramas.

An article by creativepro.com contributing editor Brian Lawler. It includes information on how to build your own very inexpensive panoramic camera mount.

Makers of the Accupan Image Capture System, a panoramic tripod head and object turntable.

Joe Veler's virtual tour of the Blue Ridge Parkway National Park in Virginia.

The Bogen 3414 with the leveling base is considered an excellent, though heavy, panorama head by most VR developers. There is a rumor that they will be releasing a new spherical head in Fall of 2002.

Sven Ullmann's panoramas from Bremerhaven, Germany.

Anaglyphic 3D panorama of a portion of a home interior with several people.

Charles Evans's panoramas from Burning Man 2000.

Interesting collection of artsy spherical fashion panoramas done for a feature in StreetWear-Today by Rolf Brenner. The site is in German with Java panoramas.

CleVR is a free panoramic photo sharing site and photo stitching software. It allows panoramas to be embedded into other web pages using a Flash viewer. Panoramas can be displayed with hotspots — areas in the scene that can be clicked to display other content or to navigate to another scene. This functionality is similar to that provided by Apple's QuickTime VR, but it allows images, text and Flash Video (FLV) video to be displayed within the panorama window. See Wikipedia for more.

Click Here Design produces two MacOS tools for developing cubic/spherical panoramas. CubicConnector ($79 USD) is a hotspot editor and CubicConverter ($69 USD) allows different types of panoramic media to be converted into and out of cubic format.

CITR Technical Report 19 is Color Anaglyphs for Panorama Visualizations by Shou-Kang Wei, Yu-Fei Huang, and Reinhard Klette. This page has an abstract and a link to a PDF file with the paper.

General information about creating QTVR panoramas and a collection of various panoramas, including some from Burning Man. A.K.A. Outside the Lines.

Freeware Windows application for selecting control points for stitching with Panorama Tools.

The name pretty much explains this tutorial by Erik Krause.

Jean-Michel Gueugnot's "light" tutorial for creating cubic panoramas from three fisheye images shot with a Nikon CoolPix 9xx series camera.

Fulvio Senore's freeware Windows software for slicing up a JPEG panorama to facilitate implementing Region Of Interest (ROIs - increased resolution as the viewer zooms in) with PTViewer.

A virtual tour of Crouch End, one of London's 'villages' by panoramic photographer Will Pearson. The tour uses an interesting Google Maps-based navigation system.

André Michelle's Flash 9 panorama player is available for free download. He requests a donation to encourage future development.

Junji Ikeda is developing a tool called FishHexCubeX. He expects it to be available in early 2003. This site provides some sample panoramas in QuickTime format.

CuTy is a minimalist open source viewer for (single node, JPEG encoded, cubic) QTVR .mov files based for Flash Player 10 and newer, developed by Aldo Hoeben for the IVRPA.

Cylinder Squisher is a quick MacOS freeware application by Michael Rondinelli of EyeSee360, Inc. It adjusts cylindrical panoramas so that the pixels are non-square. This can reduce the number of pixels and improve compression for certain high-vFOV images.

This UK software company makes D Joiner, a panoramic stitching program that appears to be similar to the Realviz stitcher. According to the site, it computes all the lens parameters and other factors automatically. The user just has to lay the images out in their approximate positions. It runs 300 pounds. They also make D Sculptor 2, a program for creating 3D models from object movies. There are some sample panoramas shot around Oxford.

Immersive VR panoramas of D-Day locations.

Windows browser plug-in for viewing panoramas and 3D visualizations of topo maps. It supports its own native format and QTVR MOV files. The plug-in is a free download. Tools for developing native-format files are available.

This is a simple online form for calculating the field of view (FOV) for a camera, given some basic information about the lens. It includes a database of common digicams with everything already filled.

The Tallinn region on the shores of the Gulf of Finland has been settled for at least 3500 and has a fascinating history. This site has historical notes and over 60 immersive QTVR panoramas. There are Flash and HTML versions of the site.

DiGiTAL ZEN is a showcase and resume for photographer, founder, and producer Terry Breheny. It includes examples of his still photography, design work, and panoramic photography.

An excellent VR tour of the pyramids using QuickTime and Flash by Andrei Bodrov.

German site with panoramas of Dubai by Sven Ullmann.

The dvGarage Reflection Toolkit is a collection of spherical maps for use with their 3D Toolkit product and other 3D applications. The samples area contains a large number of sample QTVR images. QuickTime 5 required.

This page summarizes some hardware solutions for immersive video.

An unethical panorama software and virtual tour software developer. Please do not purchase their products. Software offerings include Panoweaver stitching software ($99.95/299.95 single/pro,) Batch Wizard ($499.95,) Virtual Tour EXE ($199.95,) PTViewer Scripter ($49.95) for producing multi-node Java tours, and Modelweaver ($99.95) for building object movies. They also offer discounted bundles.

An unethical panorama software and virtual tour software developer. Please do not purchase their products. Easypano makes Panoweaver (for stitching 360x180 degree spherical panoramas from 2 or 3 fisheye images - $100 USD), Tourweaver (authoring software for creating stand-alone Java-based virtual tours - $200 to $500 USD), PTScripter (which assists in creating virtual tours using PTViewer - $50 USD), Batch Wizard (for automated assembly of panoramas from 2 fisheye images - $500 USD), Modelweaver (for creating object movies - $100), and Virtual Tour EXE (for creating stand-along executable virtual tours for Windows).

German-language site for Windows cubic panorama stitching utility.

One-shot VR lenses for digital cameras and camcorders. Details on the site are sketchy. Price is around $1000 USD.

Enblend is a tool for compositing images. Given a set of images that overlap in some irregular way, Enblend overlays them in such a way that the seam between the images is invisible, or at least very difficult to see. Licensed under the GNU GPL, Enblend is available as source or as Windows or MacOS X binaries.

This site features a Mac OS X app for creating cubic QTVR movies. There appear to be several versions, all apparently free, and much of the text appears to be Japanese.

A collection of Photoshop actions and scripts to make various panorama development tasks easier from one of the foremost professional panographers.

This is the main page for several ventures by Everen T. Brown, including a few that are VR-related. First, is the Globuscope, a $2800 USD motorless slit-scan 35mm film panorama camera for handheld or tripod use. Second is a collection of panoramic stock photography. Finally, a book of Mr. Brown's best panoramic photos, Panoramic World, sells for $20 USD.

QTVRs based on images shot on the moon.

A workflow for compositing multiple images of the same subject with different focus to create one image with an extended depth of field.

Eye Revolution is the professional face of London-based panoramic photographer Will Pearson. Eye Revolution shoots immersive VR panoramas and develops web interfaces for virtual tours.

A $1000 USD one-shot panorama system for Nikon CP9xx and 5000 series cameras. Good quality compared to some similar products. It provides about 100 degrees of vertical field of view. Kaidan resells their products.

Andreas Schömann's Windows shareware program, Full Dynamic Range Exposer (FDRExposer,) composites multiple digital image exposures of the same scene into a single image with increased dynamic range and reduced artefacts. There is also a companion program, FDRProfiler (q.v.) that helps analyze the relevant characteristics of particular digicams.

Andreas Schömann's Windows program, Full Dynamic Range Profiler (FDRProfiler,) measures the transfer response curve, color space, and noise behavior of specific digicams. This is a companion program to FDRExposer (q.v.,) which composites multiple exposures to extend dynamic range.

Field Of View and Panorama Production Calculator

The fieldOfView Fisheye Viewer is a free tool for quickly reviewing or inspecting single fisheye shots.

Fisheye Player from I MAY Software creates panoramas from single fisheye images. It runs under Windows and costs $100 USD.

Makers of several interesting Photoshop plug-ins, including SuperBlade Pro, which creates textured or mirrored and beveled objects and Flexify, which re-maps VR panoramas into other projections.

Creating 360° Panoramic Images in Flash

Actionscript.org's tutorial on making a Macromedia Flash based object movie.

A Flash-based panorama player.

A commercial multi-platform (Linux/Mac/Windows) program for creating Flash 9 immersive VR panoramas. Optimized for full-screen playback and supporting jpg, png, and gif cubic panoramas, it is priced at 39.95 Euros.

System for developing Flash-based panoramas. Runs $109 USD for a single-domain license and $450 USD for an unrestricted developer license.

FlashVRPlayer is a free (as in beer) multi-platform Flash-based immersive VR player. It requires Flash Player 9 or later.

This is a collection of panoramic images by Romuald Hervé Douris with interesting flat projections for printing.

Ian James Wood's site about the Flybot, built to allow close investigation of the forest canopy. It is a radio-controlled blimp that can shoot immersive VR panoramas from the air.

FlyCam provides real-time panoramic video by stitching together images from multiple video cameras pointed in different directions.

This is the site for the folding-time time-lapse video panorama at Burning Man 2002.

A pair of simple JavaScript calculators. One will provide the field of view (FOV) when you enter the lens focal length and camera sensor size. The other will tell you what size lens you need to photograph an object of a given size at the distance you specify.

Freedom VR 2 is a Java-based panorama and object viewer. Freedom VR 3 is a Javascript version.

FSPViewer is designed for viewing local (hard-disk, network or CD) high resolution panoramic images at full screen and with very high image quality.

The errata page for QuickTime for the Web has instructions for displaying QTVR panoramas full-screen in a browser window.

David Goldwasser set up this site to show off panoramas by photographers around the world.

Panoramic video cameras

OmniEye is a line of full-motion panoramic video surveilance cameras. They have several models, including one that does infrared. No pricing on the site.

Terragen GoCubic is a free Windows utility for creating cylindrical and cubic QuickTime panoramas. Does not create hotspots or multi-node panoramas. This is a current download link as of May 2004.

GoCubic is a free Windows utility for creating cylindrical and cubic QuickTime panoramas. Does not create hotspots or multi-node panoramas. Note that the download link from this help page is broken.

gPhotoShow 2 is a slide show maker and photo screen saver shareware program for Windows that supports several panoramic image formats including JPEGs and QuickTime MOV files. Registration is ~$15 (11.95 Euros).

Bernhard Vogl's tutorial on creating panoramas using a monopod.

Slides and Photoshop actions from Jook Leung's presentation at the September 2005 Summit In Savannah on creating high dynamic range panoramas.

A 1997 paper by Patrick Costello of Loughborough University in the UK. It covers ergonomic (posture, RSI) and hygiene issues as well as induced motion sickness.

This tutorial by Ronny D'Hoore covers the secret of editing the zenith and nadir (straight up and straight down) in an equirectangular panorama using the Panorama Tools plug-ins.

Short tutorial that describes how to add Flash menu to a Quicktime VR file.

This site describes methods for very precisely determining the nodal point of a fisheye lens on a digital camera.

This is John Houghton's step-by-step guide to making a printable panorama using Panorama Tools and PTGUI from images taken with a camera having a standard rectilinear lens. The example uses images from a Nikon CoolPix 950.

An open source Panorama Tools GUI.

The International Association of Panoramic Photographers site includes articles, links to member pages, a calendar of events, member news, and a gallery of images.

ImageFuser is a MacOSX program that fuses multiple exposures of one scene into an image with greater detail and well balanced exposure by using the well exposed areas of the original multi-exposure images. ImageFuser is a graphical frontend for the open source command line tools Enfuse and Align_Image_Stack.Next to these tools Phil Harvey's ExifTool is used to copy exif, jfif, tiff, iptc, gps, icc profile data etc. to the new images. Donationware.

Imatronics' Panorama Express is Windows software for creating immersive VR tour packages. It includes both Java and ActiveX viewers. It runs $149 USD.

A free (commercial - as in free beer) Java-based panorama viewer applet with full-screen capability.

Instructables tutorial on one technique for creating a QuickTime VR panorama.

This site features Rana Mahmood's Panoramic Photography in Dubai, UAE, including several full-screen panoramas of Masjid Al Nabawi (Prophet's Mosque) in Madina, Saudi Arabia.

Web site for a book by German author Corinna Jacobs detailing techniques for development of interactive VR panoramas.

IQTVRA is a non-profit group that promotes and supports the use of QTVR through education, community forums, special interest groups, manufacturer liaisons and commercial, technical & marketing support.

According to this site, the reason Professor Helmut Dersch has taken down his website and stopped developing Panorama Tools is legal threats from IPIX.

The IQTVRA is now offering prints of some exquisite panoramas by some of its members. Measuring 14 inches tall by up to 80 inches wide, they are printed by Photomation on a Lightjet printer.

Landis Bennett's list of immersive VR developer hardware and software links.

iStill is Mac OS X shareware for creating QTVR object movies. It is made to work with a web cam (like the iSight) or a DVD camcorder but, can also process imported still images. Registration is $25 USD.

Interesting collection of partial panoramas and wide-angle shots of Civil War battlefields near Washington D.C. by Washington Post photographer Jan Faul.

This site has a collection of QTVRs of Japanese castles.

Jasper Engineering manufactures stereo slide bars and a panoramic tripod head (~$100.)

JavaScript Plug-in Detection

Joachim Baur's projects/Tutorials, including a Lingo VR panorama viewer for use in Macromedia Director projects.

This Flash site features a number of object movies and immersive VR panoramas.

Kaidan is one of the premier VR equipment manufacturers. Their products are somewhat more affordable than those of other VR equipment manufacturers.

The Karline is a scanning-slit digital panoramic camera. It will do full spherical panoramas with 17 million pixels per image and can do stereoscopic panoramas ... but, bring your Visa card because the Karline runs 5000 Euros.

Windows Cubic VR software. This is not really mainstream photographic VR software but, rather an interesting experiment.

Ken Silverman's cubic VR software includes freely-downloadable DirectX and OpenGL viewers for Windows, a program to convert to Mercator projection, and a program to extract JPEG files from a .MOV files

Ken Turkowski is Apple's Principle Scientist in Immersive Media Technology Development in their Interactive Media Group. He provides some good tutorials as well as tools and software for QTVR development, including his DeFish program.

The Kimpotec Auto Pan-head is a battery-powered, motorized panorama head and object turntable. It currently runs $900 USD.

The KingPANO is a $160 USD spherical panohead made from black acrylic.

PalmOS multimedia authoring software that can create stand-alone presentation applications, including immersive VR panoramas and objects.

This page has some really amazing mid-air spherical panoramas (shot from kites - Kite Aerial Photography) by Scott Haefner, including some gorgeout lighthouse shots.

This is a GUI front-end for producing virtual tours with KRPano. The license is 99 to 299 Euros, depending on the version.

The KRPano software creates self-contained Flash-based immersive VR panoramas for use on the web. Features include support for large panoramas and progressive loading of higher resolution images. The developer license is 30 to 90 Euros, depending on how many domains you will use in deployment.

A panorama viewer that works in mobile Safari.

This is a database of common lenses with angle of view, field of view, and 25mm equivalent. [Note: the Flash application on this site appears to have stopped working — December 2008]

Licensing QuickTime for Re-distribution

Home made lightweight panoheads

This is the page for a high-resolution interactive panoramic video surveilence and creation system.

MacOS X software to create a QuickTime movie by panning over set points in a still image. Also supports QTVR movies.

16-bit LensFix and PanoTools plug-ins compiled for MacOS X are available for download here.

This is David Goldwasser's tutorial for using a Manfrotto Magic Arm as a tripod head for creating spherical panoramas. At ~$100 USD, the Magic Arm is very inexpensive for a spherical panorama head.

Mapwing Creator Pro from Redbug Technologies (295USD) is MacOS X software for creating virtual tours with a map interface.

A collection of high-end auto-rotating VR cameras, VR stereo cameras, lighting systems, and robotic object movie turntables, ranging in price from around 1000 to about 8000 Euros. Located in Germany. Site in both German and English.

Metadata Hootenanny is a nice interface (nicer than QuickTime Pro) for editing the metadata stored in QuickTime movies.

QTVRs of ancient Greek archeological sites.

This division of BMW produces the Mini automobiles. The site relies heavily on Flash and includes object movies of two Cooper Mini models and a panorama of one of the interiors, also available in QTVR cubic format.

Peter Nyfeler has created a Photoshop action that will automatically insert a mirrored sphere reflecting a spherical panoramic scene in the tripod cap area.

Ultra-High Resolution Digital Mosaics by J. Brian Caldwell, Ph.D. is a tutorial for stitching multi-row images using Panorama Tools.

Marke Eigenbau has built his own inexpensive multi-row object VR rig. There are pictures but, the text is in German. There are also some samples shot with this rig here.

Panormas of Hungary.

NABO is a community project intended to present immersive VR tours of private homes from all over the world. Requires QuickTime 5.

Andrew Nemeng's site has information about his photo and VR equipment, technical notes, and licensing information for his Java VR viewer applet.

Various re-complied versions of the main Panorama Tools dll (pano12.dll) with the 160 degree limitation removed.

Nodal Ninja is a relatively inexpensive ($119 USD) aluminum spherical (two axes) panoramic tripod head for use with prosumer digital cameras and compact SLR and DSLR cameras.

This is an explanation of nodal points for Nikon CoolPix 990 cameras and their adapter lenses.

Panoramic photography by Mark Fink.

Novoflex makes a ball-and-socket head that some people are using for panoramas, the Neiger 19P (MSRP $36.50.) They also make a Panorama Plate with a friction lock and a bubble level (MSRP 99 Euros.) The U.S. distributor is HP Marketing Corp in New Jersey.

The goal of OpenPanorama is to create an open and universal file format for panoramas based on XML.

Anaglyphic 3D QTVR panorama of Le Musée des Sciences Naturelles de Liège. The site is in French but, this link goes right to the pano.

Pageot is a MacOS application by Francis Gorge that generates EMBED and OBJECT code for the QuickTime Plug-in. Insert this code into HTML pages to display a QTVR .mov file.

A description and pictures of a homemade multip-row panorama head by Erik Krause.

This might be useful if you are creating panoramas under Linux, using GIMP, though it appears to be pretty simplistic compared to Panorama Tools.

Pangea VR is a free web browser plug-in for Mac OS X that allows you to view Quicktime VR panoramas with fast, high-quality OpenGL rendering.

Panini is a visual tool for creating perspective views from panoramic and wide angle photographs. More than a pano viewer, more than a view camera, with features of both. An open source project for Linux/Unix, Win32, and Mac systems with OpenGL 2.0.

German sellers of a panoramic tripod head with click-stops (219 Euros) and a one-shot lens system (649 Euros).

Pano2QTVR is Windows software that creates cubic QuickTime VR movies and Flash presentations from panoramic images and, QuickTime object movies from appropriate source images. There is a free version with limited features for non-commercial use and, a pro version (~36 to ~165 USD, depending on specific features and number of systems).

Pano2QTVR and the newer Pano2VR are commercial software for generating immersive VR images in QTVR and Flash format. Pano2QTVR is Windows-only software that can produce object movies. There is a limited free version of Pano2QTVR and paid versions of both programs ranging from 30 to 149 Euros.

PanoCube is a Windows application that will convert equirectangular panoramas or 6 individual cube faces to QTVR 5 Cubic panoramas. There is a free version and a PanoCube Plus version with extra features.

PanoDrama is a panoramic tour developer in the United Kingdom. Their site has a portfolio showcasing a number of commercially-themed panoramas.

panoguide.com - the guide to panoramas and panoramic photography. Includes tutorials, in-depth software reviews, and a gallery.

Maker of a single-shot mirror lens attachment ($395 USD). Note that the site plays music when you visit.

PanoPoints is a free Perl GTK GUI front-end for picking control points for stitching with Panorama Tools, written by JD Smith.

A WordPress plugin for displaying immersive VR panoramas using KRPano, Flash Panorama Player or Pano2VR. Supports iPad and iPhone, multi-resolution, multi-pano tours, etc.

Scanning digital panoramic cameras (SLiVR.) The basic system is $9500 USD.

A Direct X-based Windows shareware panorama viewing application by Karl Maloszek of Simple Software Berlin. Registration is 29 Euros.

A panorama sharing site that offers monthly prizes.

Site of optics professor Helmut Dersch, author various excellent open source tools for creating and displaying VR panoramas: Panorama Tools, PTStitcher, and PTViewer.

Panorama Tools mirror site

Panorama Tools mirror site.

Max Lyons is continuing to develop Panorama Tools where Helmut Dersch left off.

John Houghton's tutorial on understanding and using the Panorama Tools Optimizer.

Panorama Tools Frequently Asked Questions

Bruno Postle has created a set of RPMs and a Debian package for Panorama Tools. It includes bugfixes from Max Lyons' 08 version of the library, the missing sys_ansi.h file, support for greater than 160 degree fisheye input, and has wrapper scripts for the java tools.

Panorama Tools Plug-ins (16-bit)

The name says most of it. The site has a tutorial on calibrating PanoTools for particular lenses, too.

A collection of tutorials by Kathy Wheeler, Peter Murphy, and Helmut Dersch on various aspects of using Professor Dersch's open source Panorama Tools.

Panoramagalerie is a PHP-based program for displaying galleries of immersive VR images on the web. It supports QuickTime, Flash, Java and, Shockwave panoramas in MOV and JPEG formats with a variety of layout styles and color schemes. Panoramagalerie supports up to four languages. It supports ad hoc reading from the file system or, can use a flat file or MySQL database back end.

The Washington Post travel section presents a panoramic VR tour of Rome. The tour spawns a QuickTime window outside of the browser for a full-screen presentation. Some nice cylindrical panoramas with a few stitching errors.

This site, presented by panoramic photography luminary Hans Nyberg, features a large collection of fantastic full-screen QuickTime VR panoramas. If you are only going to visit one immersive VR content site, this should be it.

German-language site for the German-language shareware PanoramaStudio stitching software.

Tutorials on lens distortion and editing crowd panoramas plus a collection of 360-degree and spherical panoramas.

PanoSalado is an open source Flash panorama player.

Panoscan makes a series high-end digital scanning panorama cameras. Their systems include support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging. The low end of their line starts around $15,000 USD. They also provide rentals for around $500/day.

This site has an interesting collection of spherical panoramas. Currently, it appears that it only works in Internet Explorer (as of 26 March, 2002.)

The official community knowledge base of the Panorama Tools community. Wiki contributors hang out on the PanoToolsNG Yahoo Group.

User and developer community for Panorama Tools users. The list covers many related topics including hardware, related software, and technique. This group replaces the previous PanoTools group, which closed down immediately after a community fork.

Makers of VR-related software. Panoweaver ($99.95 to $340 USD, depending on features) stitches fisheye images into spherical and cubic panoramas under both Windows and MacOS. PTViewer Scripter ($49.95 USD) provides a Windows GUI for adding hotspots, custom download progress graphics, and navigation toolbars to spherical panoramas in PTViewer. Modelweaver ($99.95 USD) is Windows sofware for creating object movies.

Magnus Egelberg's PanoWizard is a simplified GUI front end for Panorama Tools and AutoPano.

Panoramas (including some 3D anaglyphs (red-blue stereograms)) by Paul R. Ladd III.

Peter Murphy's Panoramic VR Weblog

Information on some absolutely fascinating projects by Philippe Hurbain ("Philo.") This site includes information on kite aerial panography, an automated panoramic tripod head built with Lego MindStorms, IR panoramas, the "virtual tripod," and a step-by-step tutorial on creating spherical panoramas with a Nikon CoolPix and Panorama Tools.

A couple of experimental panoramas by Greg Downing that combineQTVR and Photo 3D (image based modeling or photogrammetric modeling) - a collection of techniques to aquire 3D models from photographs and then project the photographs back onto the models as texture maps resulting in a photorealistic 3D model. This provides some pretty impressive transitions between nodes in these panoramas.

PhotoSpherix uses custom-built rigs to produce Object QTVRs and Panoramic Quicktime VRs for customers.

Site of Ford Oxaal's company. He created the technology behind IPIX's system and now provides software and licensing for people doing full spherical VR using fisheye images.

Mark Fink's Pinnacle VR Universal Panoramic Head is a spherical panoramic tripod head designed to work with any normal dSLR and lens combination. It sells for 599 USD.

Site for PixMaker, a stitching application and Java viewer targeted at consumers.

Mac OS tool to create finishd HTML pages for full-screen display of panoramas. 19 Euros

A shareware Java 360 panoramic image viewer applet.

Apparently oblivious to Panorama Tools, these folks have created an opensource project to produce stitching software for MacOS X.

The Ladybug system captures "75% of a full sphere"e; of 15fps video at 1024 by 768 resolution using 6 small cameras. No pricing information on the site.

This site has basic information on pole aerial photography (or PAP) and information on constructing your own 50' rig.

An open source GUI front end for Panorama Tools. It is written for Windows but, may work under Linux via OpenKylix. PT Open GUI also reads PTGUI and PTAssembler project files.

A free Windows-based GUI front-end for Panorama Tools.

PTGui is a Windows and MacOS X graphical panoarama creation utility developed by Joost Nieuwenhuijse. Originally a front-end for Panorama Tools, PTGui now has its own stitcher and other components that allow it to operate as a stand-alone tool. It is also able to use Panorama Tools and various plug-ins (e.g., blending tools), if desired. PTGui has seen steady, very active development for many years. There are currently two versions, a regular version and a Pro version that has additional HDR-related features. License pricing ranges from 79 Euros for a personal license to 349 Euros for a corporate license of PTGui Pro.

PTGui FAQ [Moved to the PTGUI site 1/2003]

Thomas Niemann's Windows tool, PTLens, automatically corrects for lens pincushion and barrel distortion using EXIF information and a database of common cameras and lenses. Originally freeware, PTLens is now commercial software. You can download a free trial version that will process 10 images before requiring a $25 USD license. The freeware command line tool Fulla, distributed with Hugin, has similar functionality.

PTMac is a MacOS GUI front-end for Panorama Tools. A single-user license runs $49.95 USD.

A tutorial on using PTMorpher by Peter Reimer.

Photoshop Script to Correct Chromatic Aberration

This site has form interface for controlling PTViewer applet parameters for a loaded panorama. There is also some information on scripting PTViewer.

PTViewerNG is a FOSS WebGL-based immersive VR panorama viewer currently in development.

Beta software for creating multi-node PTViewer Java tours. This link goes to a simple beta tester registration and download form (July 2003.)

Timesaving utilities for authoring QuickTime content, including a set of movies for detecting whether or not QuickTime is installed and the version.

Information on building or purchasing a monopod and pano head setup for shooting immersive VR panoramas.

This site showcases work by well-known panoramic photographer Hans Nyberg.

A utility to make sequences of video stills from cubic QTVR movies.

Ian James Wood's utility to make sequences of video stills from cubic QTVR movies. $25 USD

QuickTime Alternative will allow you to play QuickTime files (.mov, .qt and other extensions) without having to install the official QuickTime Player. It also supports QuickTime content that is embedded in webpages.

Terry Breheny's QuickTime detection system.

Skyzyx.com JavaScript QuickTime detection script.

This website goes with Steven Gulie's book, QuickTime for the Web. It includes a collection of wired sprites that you can add to QuickTimeVR movies to do things like autorotate them on load.

Various sprites for use in QuickTime movies from Steven Gulie, the author of QuickTime for the Web.

Apple's mailing list for QTVR is one of the most active discussions of immersive imaging.

Information on the Apple mailing list for QTVR developers.

QuickTiming.Org is an organization of QuickTime developers, enthusiasts and evangelists. Membership is free and open to anyone interested in learning more about or doing more with QuickTime.

Really Right Stuff's panorama tripod heads, leveling bases, and related items.

Realviz makes a new high-end panorama stitching program called Stitcher. It supports multi-row panoramas and has quite a bit of sophisticated interpolation and error correction to make it easy and intuitive to use. A single system license runs about $800.

Windows software that de-fishes fisheye images to rectilinear. The free version saves at a reduced resolution or, with a watermark. The $30 USD version removes that limitation.

An open source JQuery-based object and panorama viewer.

Reseller of one-shot panorama systems including the OneShot360 and NetVision360 systems.

Even Microsoft is experimenting with omni-directional video imaging. The RingCam prototypes are constructed of inexpensive 1394 (firewire) digital cameras with a total resolution of 3000x480 pixels.

Roundshot now (June 2004) has a 70MP IVR panoramic web cam. Packages include the camera, web server, Windows-based software, etc. and start at around $7,700 USD (introductory price).

UK-based VR developers and photographer. Several cylindrical and spherical panoramas. QuickTime only.

The Seitz Roundshot cameras are motor-driven dedicated panorama cameras.

Work by panographer Serge Maandag. He also has a partial anaglyphic stereo panorama in gray and color.

David Goldwasser's tutorial on using the Match Color Adjustment feature in Adobe Photoshop CS to remove a shadow from an image.

A tutorial on how to shave the lens hood off a Nikon 10.5mm fisheye lens. The Nikon 10.5mm fisheye lens is widely regarded as the best fisheye currently on the market. Panoramic photographers using cameras with full-frame sensors often do this to get a wider field of view from the lens.

Peter Murphy's list of Shockwave 3d panorama resources.

Shooting panoramas with a 'virtual tripod'

Mike Carambat's homemade one-shot VR rig.

Harbortronics offers this rugged automated panorama head, based on the Bogen 3025 panorama head. The standard package is 1300.00 USD (8/2007).

David Buxó has set up this SourceForge project to facilitate ongoing development of PTViewer, now that Professor Dersch is no longer maintaining it.

This site has information and sample images from Dan Slater's c. 1992 Spherecam experiment. The Spherecam uses two 6mm ultra-wide-angle fisheye lenses to record a more-than-complete spherical image.

Instructions for making a small, inexpensive spherical panorama head for use on a tripod.

Greg Downing has created a series of 3 instructional DVDs for The Gonomon Workshop covering Spherical Panoramic Photography and Image Based Modeling.

An experimental, home-made light-weight spherical panorama head.

The site of Jean-François site has some fantastic spherical and cubic panoramas in Java and QuickTime. Most of the text is in French but, it is fairly easy to find your way to the panoramas.

Instructions on making an inexpensive monopod for shooting spherical panoramas with a Nikon CoolPix 9xx series camera and the fisheye adapter lens.

spincontrol:VR is a freeware custom QuickTime movie which, when embedded in a Web page with a QTVR, can control the QTVR's pan, tilt and zoom (among other things).

Kaidan and Autolycus' complete object movie solution.

Javascript VR display - no plug-in or Java required. Commercial software.

Craig Goldwyn's panoramas and object movies. Craig also does 3D stereo photography.

Makers of the SpinScape-I motorized panorama head and object platform. Currently priced starting at about $1300 USD.

A reconstruction of the Roman Village called Conimbriga being undertaken in Portugal by Santiago Ribas (see also 360Portugal.)

Details of an experiment by Greg Downing in High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI) and High Dynamic Range Compression (HDR) panoramas.

Stitching Panoramas with PTGUI and Panorama Tools, optimized for the Olympus C2500L digicam.

This site is soliciting donations to pay legal costs to challenge IPIX patent filings in the European Union.

John Houghton's tutorial on stitching handheld panoramas using Panorama Tools and PTGUI.

During the Canberra fires c. February, 2003, a number of telescopes were destroyed at Mt. Stromlo Observatory. There is also an anaglyph (red-blue stereogram) panorama.

The German-language site for Sven Ullmann's company has a page showing some of his panoramas.

VR interactive ( VRi ) Inc. manufactures a 360-degree reflector for digital cameras, similar to that used for the BeHere system (and for astronomy photography.) Their software uses a per-image licensing system like IPIX. The rig runs ~$250 USD with $6 - $7 per finished pano (watermarked proofs are free.) It provides only 60 degrees vertical field of view.

This site is run by the United States Library of Congress. Although they are not presented with vr viewers, this is a fascinating collection of panoramic photographs and they could be easily converted.

Japanese developer of a lens for the Nikon CoolPix 950/990/800 cameras that captures a 360-degree "donut" image in one frame.

This site features the PAL360 from Tateyama R&D, a lens for the Nikon CoolPix series of cameras that captures a full panorama in one shot.

Several nice stereo (anaglyph) QTVR object movies and panoramas.

Alain Hamblenne's tutorial for finding the precise location of the entrance pupil (commonly called the nodal point) of a given lens.

Makers of PanoConverter, a commercial application to convert immersive VR panoramas into VRML format. $29.95 USD.

2002 paper by Clemens Buchmayer covering the theory and creation of spherical and cubic panoramas using various software currently available. This is a comprehensive introduction to immersive imaging. Adobe Acrobat document.

Dennis Biela does the traveling QTVR training program for Apple. This CD contains the material for the class and is reported to be an excellent introduction to QTVR. The CD sells for $49.95 USD. There is a short write-up about the CD on the MacCentral site.

This site hosts a panoramic VR tour of the Tower and some nice 3D wireframe models.

This is a collection of links to devices, designs, and software for creating panoramic images.

An inexpensive ($86 USD) spherical panoramic tripod head, suitable for use with some digital cameras.

Sign up to participate in this celebration of the new millennium: shoot a panorama on January 1st, 2001.

Equipment for time lapse photography, including a rotary table for shooting time lapse panoramas.

Interesting spherical pano head design from Thomas Huang, made for specifc lenses. See also.

Details of a homemade panoramic tripod head designed for use with a fisheye lens. This site is in German.

This site uses QTVR to showcase San Francisco and the near by wine country.

Commercial immersive VR tour system for the Apple iPad.

Makers of the iShell cross-platform multimedia authoring package. It supports QTVR. Unlike Macromedia Director, it incorporates both MacOS and Windows in one package. Pricing starts around $1000 and has annual use and renewal fees.

Some gorgeous panoramas of Nova Scotia, Canada by Trish Turliuk.

A collection of panoramas by Tudor Jenkins, including some with different projections for printing.

This is a small collection of animated QuickTime VR movies created by vrhotwires and using wired sprites.

ViewAt is an archive of geo-tagged panoramic images with a Google Maps mashup interface.

This is a PhotoShop plug-in for extracting a flat jpeg image from a cylindrical QTVR panorama.

Virtual Denmark, developed by Hans Nyberg, features excellent QuickTime VR panoramas of Denmark.

Book, CD and web site by Scott Highton. The VR Photography Slate Book (for keeping records at VR shoots) is currently available. A "technical and instruction manual" called Virtual Reality Photography is slated for release in Spring 2003.

Information about photographer Scott Highton with examples of some of his panoramic work, including an aerial object movie of the Golden Gate Bridge, a NASA wind tunnel, an IMAX theater, and one shot on the side of a cliff.

Peter Murphy's site has a collection of has panoramas, notes on using Panorama Tools, a hand-stitching tutorial, and a tutorial on lens calibration.

Virtual Tour of JRR Tolkien's Oxford

Panoramic images of Whistler, BC, the site of the 2010 Winter Olympic games.

Carrington Weems' company provides immersive VR development services. The site contains a number of excellent VR tours as samples of their work.

This site offers a system for realtors to create and post virtual tours of homes.

The Voyageur PanoMachine is an automatic (remote-controlled) pano head and object turntable. It currently (April 2007) appears to be vaporware.

QTVR post-production and wired sprite editor for MacOS. Can be used for directional sound, sound labels, text labels, animations inside panoramas, object movies inside panoramas, and linear transitions. It runs $199 USD.

VR Toolbox, Inc., Industrial Strength Tools for QuickTime VR. Maker of VRWorx stitching and QTVR output tools for professional VR photographers.

Michael Naimark's paper on VR Webcams.

Erik Goetze's weblog about immersive VR.

VRSmarty is an immersive VR tour creator, similar to krpano.

Commercial software for VR developers. conVRter is an AppleScriptable VR Panorama Editor. deliVRator is a QuickTime Streaming Movie Editor that creates output optimized for web delivery.

VRWay is a showcase for QTVR panormas. Their VRMag section showcases a different panoramic photographer every month.

The WHTour is creating a documentary image bank of panoramic pictures and virtual reality movies for all sites registered as World Heritage by the UNESCO.

Fine art panoramic photography by London-based Will Pearson.

The BBC's historical reconstructions of World War One trenches in panoramic VR. Some nice work.

European World War 2 Landmarks and Memorials of in Fullscreen QTVR.

On Saturday, March 20, 2004, more than 180 photographers in 40 countries around the world celebrated the Equinox by creating VR panoramas. This is an off-shoot of the Wrinkle Project.

Site of the second Wrinkle Project event, March 20/21, 1998 - A Virtual Tour of Mother Earth.

Robert Abbett's original Wrinkle Project shoot, December 21st, 1997.

Home of the wrinkle in time 2000.

Zoomify is a $199 USD authoring tool and set of free viewers that allow streaming of high-resolution images (including immersive VR panoramas) over the web. Viewer solutions include Java, ActiveX, browser plug-in, QuickTime component, and stand-alone viewer. With their auto-detection system, they promise 98% compatibility with deployed browsers. Unlike some similar technologies, there is no server component and no per-image licensing fee.