Lakeridge Elementary QuickTime VR Project

Once again, making a QuickTime Virtual Reality walk-through of our school was an interesting and educational experience. We learned how to use iPhoto to download our photos from our cameras to our Macs, and we learned how to use QuickTime VR Authoring Studio to compose panoramas and scenes.

Taking Photos

In order to facilitate taking photos, I built a guide that could be attached to a tripod. Using a piece of cardboard and one of the stools in the ELC, I traced a circle and cut it out. I also cut a hole in the center of the circle so I could attach it to the tripod. The cardboard was marked and divided into 12 "slices." This helped the students to properly align the camera for each shot, as we needed 12 shots per scene. This makes aligning the camera much easier and allows the photographer to easily see how many photos she or he has taken.

While walking in my neighborhood I found near a construction site the "bubble" from a level that had been broken out of the level.

We used this to make sure the camera was level when we had it on the tripod. The tripod also had a level so we could make sure it was level as well. (You might notice a scene or two where things weren't quite level).

We shot our photos with a Kodak EasyShare DX6340 camera. The highest resolution photos took up too much space on the camera's internal memory and were unnecessarily large for use in making panoramas. The final scene "size" would be 320 X 240, so a huge photo was not needed. We chose to use the lowest resolution on the camera, "Good," which gave us high enough resolution photos.

The images were then downloaded into iPhoto. In the Finder I created a folder to hold the downloaded folders, then dragged them from iPhoto and dropped them in my folder in the Finder, which makes a copy of the image. From there we copied them to an old tray-loading iMac that we use to run QTVR Authoring Studio.

Processing Photos

Organization is key whenever creating a large QuickTime scene like this. When the collection of photos from iPhoto were copied over to the QTVR iMac, we created folders named after the scene, like "ELC" or "Front Office." We then dragged the photos into the appropriate folders. We used Finder labels, which allow you to label a folder with a color, to indicate which scenes still needed to be stitched. The photos that we took were then loaded into QTVR Authoring Studio. Starting with a new "Panorama Stitcher" file in QTVR Authoring Studio, we batch imported the photos into the scene. Since the camera names the photos sequentially, they stay in the correct order.

After you import the photos into QTVR Authoring Studio, you can start stitching them together. By clicking the triangles between the photos, as shown in the screenshot above, you can correlate the two images, aligning them as closely as possible. This is repeated until all 12 images have been correlated.

We repeated this process for each of the panoramas we wanted to create. In all, there were 37 distinct panoramas that we used to compose the final complete scene. The final scene is also created in QTVR Authoring Studio, as a "Scene Maker" document. Using a map of the school, which can be imported into QTVR Authoring Studio, we laid out and aligned the panoramas.

Once the panorama files are added to the scene (they are the "nodes" with the .pano suffix in the screenshot above), we created "Dual Links" between each of the panoramas. The links are represented by the arrows in the screenshot above. This is what makes it possible to walk from one scene to the next. When the links have been established between the individual panoramas, it was time to create hot-spots in the scenes. Hot spots allow you to define a specific part of the panorama as being a "link" to another scene. When you move through a QTVR panorama, you'll notice that the cursor changes to an arrow to indicate that there is a hot spot present; clicking the hot spot takes you to the next scene. There is also an option in QuickTime Player to highlight hot spots; click the button with the arrow with "?" in it and the hot spots will change color to indicate where they are, like in the screenshot below.

Using the Scenes

Navigate through the scenes using your mouse. You can click and drag within the window to move 360° through the scene. The Shift key on the keyboard will zoom in, while the Control key will zoom out. You can show the hot spots in the scene by clicking on the button at the far right of the window, shown above. When you click on a hot spot, you will be taken to a different panorama.

produced by: Josh Burker, Andrew, Kendall, Nick, Isaac, Nolan, Tara, Jake, Abigail, Chris, and a few others