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About Digital Navigable Panoramas The navigable panoramas of movie sets from The Last Samurai were created using Apple Computer's Quicktime VR technology (the VR stands for virtual reality). This format allows a viewer to navigate 360° around a photographic image. Eric Chen developed Quicktime VR with other members of Apple Computer's research division in 1995. While traditional 360° panoramas and cycloramas dating back more than 200 years engulf the physical body with a large-scale representation of an environment, digital navigable panorama technologies, like Quicktime VR, replace bodily movement with mouse movement. Quicktime VR Quicktime VR is an example of a digital imaging technique known as image-based rendering, in which representations of 3D environments are made from photographic images rather than designed from scratch (synthesized with geometric primitives such as polygons). Image-based rendering is most useful when the 3D environment being created is based on a ‘real’ subject that can be captured photographically. To make a Quicktime VR panorama, an environment is photographed multiple times using a camera that can rotate along a 360° axis from a single point. These images are digitized and ‘stitched’ together to form a single, cylindrical image or, using the newer Cubic VR format, a grid of six connecting square images. These cubic panoramas, also known as spherical panoramas, encompass a person's full field of view, allowing the viewer to ‘look’ up and down at the sky and ground, or ceiling and floor, of the image. When a panorama is being explored using mouse and keyboard, the real-time warping of the photographic image simulates the panning and zooming of a camera. Today, these and other digital panorama technologies are being used widely on the Internet to give people a sense of being in real places, from studio apartments to the pyramids of Egypt. Additionally, historical panoramas, many more than 200 years old, have been converted to these digital navigable formats. Movie and Television Sets in 360 Unlike contemporary or historical architectural imagery, a movie set is already a virtual environment, created only for the purpose of being filmed. For this reason, navigable panoramas of movie sets can be thought of as virtual recreations of virtual recreations. The entertainment industry first used Quicktime VR in 1995 in one of the most successful non-game CD-ROM products of its time: Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual. 1997's CD-ROM Batman and Robin: The CyberExperience was another early use of the technology by the film industry. Today, environments from films such as Moulin Rouge, the Harry Potter series, Spiderman 1 and 2, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy have been presented online using Quicktime VR or a competing format from iPix. Allowing an audience to explore the movie set online prior to the movie’s release is one of many ways in which movie studios market and promote movies on the Internet. Navigable panoramas of movie sets also serve as a form of digital preservation, allowing environments that are otherwise destroyed to be ‘visited’ and studied by future generations of audiences, students, and film professionals. Unique Narrative Experiences Using Quicktime VR Digital navigable panoramas are used as a narrative device in some unique online projects. 360 Degrees combines Quicktime VR with spoken audio to confront viewers with the realities of the criminal justice system. What We Will is an experimental interactive drama.

Eric Chen's original 1995 technical paper on Quicktime VR, published by the Association for Computing Machinery, in .pdf format.   Online bibliographic resource detailing history of panoramas and cycloramas from the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.   A little out of date, Outside The Lines remains a clearly presented online tutorial on low-cost methods of making cylindrical Quicktime VR images. The personal web site of Ken Turkowski, another original Quicktime VR developer, contains advanced Quicktime VR authoring information, as well as his own panoramas.   Hans Nyberg's Panoramas.dk presents impressive full-screen navigable panoramas submitted by digital panoramic photographers around the world. The Library of Congress' panoramic photographs from 1809-1910, and The Battle of Bergisel, an 1809 painted panorama in Innsbruck, Austria, have been converted to the Qucktime VR format.   360 Degrees, from Picture Projects What We Will, from z360