
Apple's forgotten virtual-reality project QuickTime VR - jonbaer
http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-story-of-apples-forgotten-virtual-reality-project-quicktime-vr-2016-5
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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/](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.

~~~
dvdplm
Me too! It was such amazing fun and we really believed we'd make it big time.
We built "VR tours" to art cities in Italy. A few are still online:
[http://www.girareggio.it/](http://www.girareggio.it/) and
[http://www.comune.bologna.it/girabologna/](http://www.comune.bologna.it/girabologna/)
and sort of kinda working. We used a Seitz Roundshot 220VR camera to take all
the photos. Probably the weirdest camera I have ever used, quite special. As
you say, it soon became clear that Apple was not investing any effort in QTVR
(or in QT in general tbh) and I remember struggling writing a QT C-extension
for our PHP-based authoring env. Good times!

~~~
ascorbic
When I first started I didn't even have a digital camera. I took the photos
with a film camera, had them printed, then scanned them in! Quite a contrast
with shooting a panorama on my phone now.

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carlob
I fondly remember my Star Trek CD-ROM that would let you explore the TNG
Enterprise using QuickTime Vr

[http://memory-
alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Gener...](http://memory-
alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation_Interactive_Technical_Manual)

FWIW the article claims that QuickTime VR was unveiled in 1995, but it was
actually 1994.

~~~
khedoros
I had the Star Trek Omnipedia as a kid (actually, still do; 2 versions of it,
complete with janky voice recognition), and I was embarrassingly jealous of a
friend that had the Tech Manual. As far as I was concerned, he could tour
around the Enterprise whenever he wanted.

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yardie
I still have my Wu-Tang Forever [0] enhanced CD with the QTVR rooms. You could
tell RZA really enjoyed working on the VR rooms. Based on what I know about
him he is a gadget-colic.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu-
Tang_Forever](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu-Tang_Forever)

------
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](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](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!

~~~
buttcoin
I spent a lot of time in late 99-2001 playing around with some of the
prototypes IPIX was working on at the time. They had some of the best 360
stitched photography i'd ever seen, they'd built a quasi in-expensive adaptor
for the Nikon cameras (The model that twisted in the middle), and were
prototyping some really awesome 360 video tech. I think the best video I saw
was a prototype helmet they'd put on users, allowing them to see stitched 360
footage from the perspective of a motorcycle riding through the Appalachians.

It makes me wonder how things would have turned out if a few of those
companies had worked together rather than individually trying to solve the
same problems.

~~~
Keyframe
I presume people from those companies, for the most part, went on to build
(together) similar stuff in bigger companies like Google once their initial
companies folded.

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Adaptive
In 1996-97 I was working at an anthropology center in Thailand. I was using
quicktime VR to capture the interiors Thai temples and cultural heritage
objects in 3d. We used a gigantic pivoting rig for the large objects.

This was all on __film cameras __(nikons). We had film scanners (and film
printers for creating presentations), the works (a special tripod head was
used for the interior shots).

This was back when you had to use MPW (mac programmers workbench) to do the
actual stitching.

I'm sure all those photos are sitting in some government office still (or
maybe in that center) and could even be reprocessed today, in a MUCH easier
manner.

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

~~~
azinman2
Why? QuickTime is one of the best media stacks out there.

~~~
dingo_bat
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.

~~~
shiggerino
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.

~~~
dingo_bat
>I can't even remember ever being able to seek in a Windows Media file without
breaking the entire playback.

What's that got to do with Quicktime?

~~~
modfodder
I believe he is implying that Quicktime was the only app/codec/container that
allowed the user to stop, rewind, fast forward, jump around in the clip
without the app completely failing. As a video editor for the past 26 years,
that has been my experience. Every other video playback app/container that
I've used (on both Windows and Mac) failed at treating a clip in a non-linear
manner. My current preference is still for Quicktime 7, the utility knife for
video playback (even more so than VLC in my experience).

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panglott
Played around with panoramic QuickTime circa 2001-2002, after I got my first
iBook. QuickTime was great on Mac, but man, (perhaps unless you spent a lot of
money on photo-editing software) stitching those photos together was a bear.

~~~
yardie
$50 would have gotten you GraphicConverter, the utility knife of anything
related to images. I used it to stitch photos together way back in the 90s.

To most people $800 Photoshop was the only hammer they knew.

~~~
zcmncbv
oh man GraphicConverter was awesome!

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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.

~~~
mxfh
People don't call Google Street View and others VR, yet it's the same
technology. A series of panoramic photos.

It's a misnomer in my opinion. So says Wikipedia
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_VR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_VR)

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ino
Impressively stitched together, specially for the time. Even in 2008 it was a
big effort to do it well in hugin. Photoshop also later improved their
stitching tech and Microsoft research made ICE which was also nice.

In the demo, the ball of his mouse gets sticky. No amount of nostalgia can
make ball mice look good.

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aaronwidd
There was a brief time when QuickTime VR and photo stitching were considered
essential skills for anyone getting into digital media.

The use cases for it in web projects turned out pretty limited after the
novelty wore off though. Quickly narrowed down to mostly real estate and
automotive demos. But some companies in manufacturing and science I think
really relied on the tech in their digital sales materials for a long time.

~~~
vitd
There were some interesting games that used it. I think the 3rd Journeyman
Project used either QTVR or some other similar technology. And didn't the Myst
series eventually switch to something like that in later games?

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jrowley
Eric Chen, mentioned in the article is now working on his own VR startup
Bellus3D. [http://bellus3d.com](http://bellus3d.com) I worked there for a
minute. Really cool stuff they are doing.

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zcmncbv
I had a job producing QTVR back in the day and there wasn't even a GUI to do
the stitching at first, you had to use a program written in some Mac
development environment (can't remember its name) and it was always crashing

