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Apple's forgotten virtual-reality project QuickTime VR

businessinsider.com

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Re: Apple's forgotten virtual-reality project QuickTime VR

#4

Post by ascorbic »

I first saw QuickTime VR in around 1999, and was so blown away by it that I ended up building a whole business around it. I made software that stitched the images, assembled them into a QTVR movie and let you build Streetview-type tours hosted on our servers. It was great fun, though reverse-engineering the Apple Graphics codec used for the the clickable hotspots was a bit tedious. Eventually we abandoned QTVR, as it became clear Apple had abandoned it. It was also a pain doing something that required the user to have the QuickTime plugin installed. We moved to using Flash instead, and it lives on at http://www.clevr.com/ . It's pretty much abandoned now, as the state of the art in stitching is miles ahead of what it was then. I will eventually move it to use an HTML5 viewer. Amazingly there are still thousands of MAUs, despite having had virtually no updates in years.

Re: Apple's forgotten virtual-reality project QuickTime VR

#5

Post by dingo_bat »

azinman2 wrote: post #3
NTripleOne wrote: post #2

Personally, I'm happy to forget anything that has quicktime in the name...

Why? QuickTime is one of the best media stacks out there.

Is that true? I've always associated Quicktime with lag and bugs. Also, one of the rare instances of non-driver software causing BSODs, which is quite a mean feat.

Re: Apple's forgotten virtual-reality project QuickTime VR

#6

Post by micheljansen »

dingo_bat wrote: post #5
azinman2 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? QuickTime is one of the best media stacks out there.

Is that true? I've always associated Quicktime with lag and bugs. Also, one of the rare instances of non-driver software causing BSODs, which is quite a mean feat.

On Windows it's always been terrible. The Mac frameworks are pretty solid.

Re: Apple's forgotten virtual-reality project QuickTime VR

#7

Post by shiggerino »

dingo_bat wrote: post #5
azinman2 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? QuickTime is one of the best media stacks out there.

Is that true? I've always associated Quicktime with lag and bugs. Also, one of the rare instances of non-driver software causing BSODs, which is quite a mean feat.

I can't even remember ever being able to seek in a Windows Media file without breaking the entire playback. Never had any problems like that with QuickTime.

Re: Apple's forgotten virtual-reality project QuickTime VR

#8

Post by Keyframe »

Quicktime VR found its niche later on. There were camera attachments for 360 lens "simulations" where you could shoot a scene and have it in QTVR. There were postcards (physical with CDs) with those.

I remember this though https://vimeo.com/97806117 which was more of a VR. We even had stereo glasses on workstations. There was also IO Glasses, later on, for PCs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbNUIwi5F6g This was more like VR, not like QTVR. It gave you a dizzy spell and/or a headache after 15 minutes or so. It was worth it when playing Dark Forces with it though.

edit: I just remembered. IO Glasses cost somewhere about 1600 Deutsche Mark (around 800 Euros) and thing sucked, but not by much. I might still have them somewhere!

Re: Apple's forgotten virtual-reality project QuickTime VR

#10

Post by pluma »

I didn't forget it, I just never associated it with VR as VR glasses were prohibitively expensive and practically dead in consumer entertainment at that point.

I recall seeing it on a few websites back in the day but the loading times were bad and the plugin was horrible (as plugins tend to be). The drawbacks didn't outweigh the gimmicky benefits of having 360° photos.

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