At Virtual Parks you can see panoramas in close to Full Screen and Charles Evans uses it in a similar way as I do. Bostjan Burger in Slovenia has made a special Full Screen page inspired by me and there are several others you can find at my site WorldWide VR Panoramas which is a linksite with links to panoramas WorldWide. I also present a QTVR Full Screen Panorama every week (14 in the archive as per 0606 2002)

I have checked performance of my Full Screen panoramas up to 1600x1200 resolution on a 21" screen. The people I demonstrate it for are amazed and the larger screen size the more positive the reactions are.
The possibility to publish panoramas in Full Screen like I do, is in my opinion a major advantage for QTVR.
It is not possible with JAVA solutions. The solutions I made in VR Aarhus and Virtual Denmark for preloading the panoramas are also my own solutions which makes it possible with a standard modem to load the panorama in the background as a hidden movie while you are reading text or looking at an external link about the location. Just try and see how fast 30 seconds goes when you are reading some text. You never feel that you are wasting your time waiting for the download looking at an empty screen, a logo or a blurry image. And 30-60 seconds is enough to download the first 25-50 % of the movie, ( even with a 56k modem ) which will display in full resolution when you load it into a Full Screen. Or you can just wait until the whole pano is downloaded.

What you need to create Full Screen Panoramas.

My equipment is very simple. The Pentax MZ-5 is very small and handy and the Pentax Zoom Fisheye 17-28 is a very sharp lens for a Fisheye type. With this you need 8 shots vertical for a 120 degree FOV or 6 horisontal for an 80 FOV. One for the top and one for bottom to do cubics. Usually I ad a copyright disk for the bottom. I use the Fuji 400 asa film as a standard film some times pushed to 1600 asa. Negative film is essential when making panos because of the very high range. Have a look at these panoramas which contains the sun in the image. It can not be done with a digital camera. Not even with the most expensive professional. Comment added 18/09/02: OK I have to admit I just bought a Canon D60. Read at www.panoramas.dk/d60 about my upgrade to digital. It can now be done in some images. Also when using fisheye and handstitching the problem with the nodal point is very small. The nodal point is only essential for the parts of the panorama close to you. Just keep that in mind and place that part in the middle of the image. With handstitching you do not need to have accurate overlapping you can do 50% overlapping in one and 25% with the next image. I do many of my panoramas handheld for example the to examples below from Aarhus Festival. Sometimes I use my wrist to turn the camera with the arm stretched up above me. You can turn the camera around very accurate that way. An example is Number 27 in the events section of VR Aarhus Remember this is a 1/30 of a second exposure full opening 3.5 with my Pentax Fisheye. I am only 1.62 cm high, but with my arm stretched up I reach 2 meter, just enough to be close in front of the performer on the stage.

I do the scanning on an old Duoscan at 1000 ppi. The panos from this with the 8 full frame fisheye shots is around 4000 pixels wide. Just enough for Full Screen. I would actually say that larger than 5000 pixels wide for a cubic panorama is not recommended if you want all to be able to see it. The reason is that the size in uncompressed kb grows very fast and this uses all your computer memory. Even a 4000 pixels cubic will use more than 100 mb of ram together with your system. If you have less ram the resolution is automatically downsized especially during panning. There is no problem viewing it with a standard 68 mb ram computer but you can not see the full resolution. a 2000x4000 cubic is 20 mb uses 100-120 mb ram with system 9.2 on mac. a 2650x5300 cubic is 40 mb uses 200-230 mb ram A cylindrical movie can of course be wider if the FOV is only 70 to 80 degree. How many viewers on the net have more than 128 mb ram? With the Duoscan glass less holder I can scan 12 images in one scan. This is enough to scan all images for the pano in one file which is about 90 mb. The scanning is done with a very large range. I can do a scan from a negative set which includes everything from the sun in the image to the darkest shadows. This is not possible with dias. Today scanners with 1200 ppi resolution or more using the same principal as Duoscan are available to very reasonable prices. Optimizing colors, range and sharpening is always done after stitching. From the large 90 mb scan (takes about 6 minutes) I copy the images with a Fixed Size selection to a layer file. By using an action all the images in the layer are converted to spheric projection and the layer canvas is increased to 4500 pixels wide. This can be done in 15 - 20 min including scan. Now you can drag and blend the images to create the pano. Its very simple. A cylindrical pano takes from 1-2 hours including scanning. A cubic is more complicated. It can be done in 2-3 hours but sometimes I use 4. This is the same time that people using RealViz stitcher are using according to their Gallery pages. This is my last it took 4 hours. 1 mb 2300x4600 Full Screen Cubic Peter Murphy has a very good tutorial about how to stitch hand held panoramas. The way I do it is just a variant of his tutorial. Also have a look at Andrew Nemeths site .

How do you make Full Screen panoramas which pan smoothly ?

News 0606 2002 The problems described below with Sorensen compression and MacOS 9 is solved in the new QuickTime 6 preview

The movies are 800x600 they will open in a new window. Movie size is 644 kb to 1.3 mb Use 1024x768 screen. Remember to close the window before opening a new movie.
Several movies open at the same time degrades the performance of QuickTime.

1. fullscreen1x12q_med_jpg.mov 644 kb My standard setting for FULL SCREEN panoramas. In VR Aarhus they open in a window which expands to the size of the Screen of your computer. The size is set to 100 % width and 97% Height (the rest is to the text in the top)

2. fullscreen1x1q_med_jpg.mov 1 single tile. You have to download the whole movie before you can see it. If you have to little memory for your browser you get a broken icon. This is because you have to keep the movie uncompressed in the browser. Explorer needs 30-40 mb. Because you have it uncompressed from the start it moves very smooth.

Problems with jerky panoramas which do not pan smoothly before you have panned all the way round once has been discussed again and again on the QuickTime VR list.
I have never seen anyone been able to describe what causes this problem. I have been surfing around on the web collecting links for my QTVR link page in VR Aarhus for a long time now and I have found it again and again also on sites which are very well made with otherwise superior panoramas. Just the problem with this jerky panoramas.

I have tried to locate the problem several times earlier without result. After I found it on several of the pages at Apples Hot Picks and made the review of the pages I made a new attempt and I found that the problems are definitely associated with the Sorensen compression.
The examples above shows the large differences between JPG and Sorensen.
I have also checked about 20 jerky panoramas from several sites. They where all with Sorensen compression.
The Sorensen compression seems to have been very popular some years ago probably after it was introduced in QuickTime. The result is that there are thousands of jerky panoramas on the net at many sites.

It can be solved simply by recompressing the movie to JPG in any of the programs which can do this. I have tried VR Worx opening the movie as a scene and recompressing it.
Everything works smooth after that.

Updated 081101:
The Jerky panoramas described above seems to be associated with MAC OS System 9

I tested the page in my Virtual PC with both quickTime 4.1 and 5.02 and to my surprise panorama no 8 above had no jerky movements with this very low performance configuration. My Virtual PC is compatible with a 133 mhz PC. This made me test it on Mac OS 8.6 which I have on the same Computer as 9.1. No 8 was slightly jerky but I had no problems move it at all. Quicktime 4.1 made no difference on any system.

Next check was on my to oldtime MACs a 200 mhz Powerbook 3400 and a power PC 7100 with only 66 mhz. Both with system 8.6.

No severe problems with any of the movies. Even on my 7 year old 7100 the 800x600 fullscreen panoramas can be seen without any problem.

On my 233 mhz G3 beige with System 9.1 all Sorensen compressed movies are severely disabled.

I have got several report which confirms that the problem seems to be MAC OS System 9.1 and 9.2. I have not tested 9.0 .

Even on a G4 450 with 512 mb of ram and QT5, movie no 8 is jerky.

There is no problem I know of in Windows.

News 060602 The Jerkyness with Sorensen and MacOS 9 is solved in the new QuickTime 6 preview

Other experiences send me a mail