Click Here Design, a small interactive media developer based in Sydney, Australia, has recently released two new QuickTime VR authoring tools for working with the “cubic” format introduced with QuickTime 5.0.
QuickTime 5’s “Cubic VR” format means that points of view are no longer limited to lateral line of sight, but rotate through a complete sphere. It provides 360-degree, immersive images. For examples, go to Apple’s Cubic VR Gallery.
CubicConverter is a tool for converting various types of images into and out of cubic format QuickTime VR movies. It allows for the conversion of equirectangular images (“photospheres”), cylindrical panoramas or movies, or sets of cube faces used for VRML 2.0 background nodes into cubic format QuickTime VR movies playable with QuickTime 5.0.
During conversion, the program allows the cube faces making up the panorama to be retouched in an editing tool such as Photoshop to remove tripod artifacts or blemishes. Additionally, CubicConverter can easily extract cylindrical panoramas from older format QuickTime VR movies (version 1 or 2) so they can be converted or saved. If the QuickTime VR movie is already a cubic format movie, its cube faces can be extracted so they can be viewed by a VRML world viewer or used in a 3D rendering program.
More information, screenshots, tutorials, videos and download links can be found at the CubicConverter Web site.
CubicConnector is an authoring application for linking cubic format QuickTime VR files into multinode movies or HTML-linked single nodes. It offers a streamlined approach to importing source nodes, defining hotspots, connecting those hotspots to destination nodes or URLs, previewing the connected movie and finally exporting it to either a multinode movie (where all nodes are contained in the same file) or a series of single-node movies that have URL hotspots that reference the other movies.
Additionally, to assist you in getting your QuickTime VR movies onto the Web with the minimum of effort, CubicConnector can export a number of ready-made HTML templates that contain the correct embedding syntax for the QuickTime plug-in.
More information, screenshots, tutorials, videos and download links can be found at the CubicConnector Web site.