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Putting together this QuickTime VR project was a rewarding experience. Not only did we get to familiarize ourselves with the layout of the school, we got to work with some excellent software and hardware in the process.
We started out by photographing the school using an Olympus D-450 Zoom 1.3 Megapixel digital camera mounted on a tripod. Since the lens is pretty close to the mounting point on the tripod, we were able to create a series of photographs that would be stitched into a panorama without too much distortion.The photographs were shot at the lowest resolution, 72 dpi, which is perfect for a monitor.
After we had our images, we loaded them onto a Macintosh G4 Cube through a SmartMedia Flashgate™ card reader. After copying the files to a local drive, we then imported them into QuickTime VR Authoring Studio. We had to create our own lens type in QTVR Authoring Studio, one that reflected the 35mm lens on the Olympus camera. Once the correct overlap was established by the lens type, we correlated the images and stitched them together to create single panoramas.
The panoramas were then imported into a QTVR Scene. We scanned a map of Islander onto which we could drop our panoramas. This aided in correctly laying out our VR walk-through. Once the panoramas were in place it was merely a matter of linking the panoramas together to complete the walk through. Adding hot spots to each of the panoramas allows the user to navigate through the halls and classrooms of Islander Middle School.
Since the finished QTVR scene ended up so large, we thought that we would distribute our work in two different ways. If you have access to broadband connectivity, you might want to look at the scene in its entirety. However, if your connection is slower, you might want to use the image map to choose from a selection of panoramas.