Pangea Software — best known for its popular Macintosh games like Nanosaur, Otto Matic, Enigmo and many others — also develops PangeaVR, a free Web browser plug-in that enables you to view Virtual Reality (VR) panoramas with dramatically improved performance and quality. The developer has released a new 3.0 version that is a Universal binary, for even better performance on Intel-based Macs.
PangeaVR, crafted for Mac OS X specifically, lets you view panoramic VR photos in full-screen typically at frame rates from 150 to 350 frames per second (FPS). It works with both QuickTime VR “cubic” format and equirectangular JPEG “spherical” panoramas.
PangeaVR doesn’t override QuickTime as the default player for .mov files with embedded QuickTime VR data — it requires developers to embed HTML code in their Web pages to activate it. The Pangea Web site includes a number of links to Web sites that have been updated to work with PangeaVR, so you can see it in action after you’ve downloaded and installed the plug-in.