wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: Adobe to buy Macromedia - So what ?
Ray Broussard 2005-Apr-20 00:23:00
>This begs me to ask the question. . . "Why are there no Flash-based
>spherical viewers out there?"
Flash is just 2d - no built in math to display an image warped to a
shape - not even a cylinder. You can only display flat pictures. The
flash panos you see are just scrolling flat pictures - except for the
ones that either display a bunch of stretched vertical slices or
those that flip pictures as you pan. It is possible to display
sphericals/cubics in flash with the flip picture method, but they are
not bandwidth friendly and it is a lot of extra work. What you do is
create your cubic your normal way and then while displaying it in a
player, you pan, screen capture, pan, screen capture, rinse, repeat
until you have a matrix of images like you would use in an object
movie. Then in flash, you set up your controller to flip to the
appropriate picture for whichever way they pan. You can include
zooming if you have the energy.
As a matter of fact, for the flip picture method, if you shoot with a
lot of overlap, you don't really need to bother stitching, your
original pictures will work fine. This was the technique we used in
HyperCard, SuperCard & Director for our interactive sphericals before
QTVR or PhotoBubbles were released over ten years ago. The problem
is that a bunch of overlapping pictures requires a lot more megabytes
of disk space than a cubic. - and is not an efficient download.
If you bothered to write some fancy Flash code to sell to
panographers for displaying panos better in flash, the very next
week, the feature would likely be included in the newest version of
Flash.
Shockwave spheres use Director's 3D engine. But Shockwave plugin
penetration is no better than QT. Macromedia has been careful to keep
Flash's plugin very small - they credit Flash's success to the size
of the plugin. Hence, if a 3d engine were shoved into Flash, the
plugin would become too big and Flash might become less popular. It
might never happen. What would be great, would be if we evolve into a
world with 98% of folks ready for QT. Believe it or not, 15% of
people cannot see a java pano and some of those that cannot, suffer
machine or browser lock-ups when they try. After ten years,
displaying panos on the web is still an unreliable parlor trick.
Ray Broussard