tours

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

Osage Village (QuickTime 6)

This is a prototype of the type of thing I would love to do a lot more of. It is an example of the type of integration that is possible between QuickTime and Flash. It is still under development. It requires QuickTime (version 6 or better).

Osage Village (QuickTime 5)

This is a QT5 version of the tour above. The navigation map on the left is a QuickTime VR map instead of a Flash map as above. It requires QuickTime (version 5 or better).

Photo Gallery

This is a tour of something that doesn't (yet) exist, a gallery of my photos. The first version consisted of digital photos I collected over three years. The gallery that went up in Feb. 2005 consists of selected scans from my collection of an estimated 7,000 pictures taken with a film camera over an 11-year period. The latter version also uses Flash. It probably won't be very satisfying over a dialup connection, but I hope you'll get at least a little enjoyment out of it over broadband. It requires QuickTime (version 6 or better).

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.