John Berger, "Ways of Seeing"
With a shutter snap and a quick flash of sulfur, Louis Daguerre's mid-19th century technology was radically affecting the way people communicated. The then infant medium of photography challenged all previous interpretations of reality--art, writing, politics, history itself--with the bold innovation of mechanical reproduction. Some fifty years later, Edison's kinetoscope transcended this precise medium by adding motion, and therefore, simulated life from a static form. So real was the felt response to this early cinema that when Lumiere displayed a short film of a train pulling into a station, French audiences allegedly jumped from their seats.
A century later, Apple Computer has introduced us to the next step in our journey from the real to the replicated with QuickTime VR. But unlike the incremental improvements made to these previous reproductive technologies, QuickTime VR takes one giant leap toward a realistic reproduction--more like introducing the computer to a cave artist than adding motion to the still image or color and sound to the moving image.
In short, Apple's QuickTime VR is a color, three-dimensional, panoramic, user-navigable digital reproduction of any environment the user chooses, either real or constructed. In addition to creating what is potentially the most significant development in nonverbal communication since cinematography, QuickTime VR software is also the first authoring tool intended for amateur, non-commercial production of virtual reality on the desktop.
Introducing Apple's QuickTime VR
The most basic QuickTime VR scene cleverly adapts Apple's QuickTime mini-movie format to create a navigable panorama, the perspective of which may be manipulated by panning right, left, up, or down with the mouse. It is based on two simple principles:
-
* Allow the user to control the speed and direction of playback
* Instead of using independent, successive frames that are limited to a linear playback, utilize frames that are stitched together into a single, continuous fabric, enabling a smooth and seamless transition in any direction.
The resulting scene, or node, affords the spectator a complete 360-degree view of the photographed location, and the ability to zoom in or out on a specific spot in the environment. A further application of QuickTime VR may incorporate several linked scenes and navigable object movies embedded in MacroMind Director to create complete virtual worlds, where participants may move through a photo realistic space, pick up and examine three-dimensional objects, or otherwise interact with a digital environment.
The potential applications are infinite. From the simplest snapshot to fully-encompassing, interactive virtual realms, the concept behind this technology promises to change the very nature of visual communication. Just as the image leaped in context from subjective interpretation to a more objective truth with photography, and from static document to living form with cinematography, so shall virtual reality affect the analog reproduction, bringing intelligence and flexibility to rigidity. User-control will predominate as all modes and media which currently rely on images--entertainment, education, business and advertising, and art can be drastically reconstructed. In much the same way the Web democratized information by shattering the need for one-way broadcast dissemination, QuickTime VR promises to liberate the two-dimensional image from its linear functionality. And though these presumptions are nothing new to the dialogue about the virtual future, QuickTime VR's singular novelty is that it offers us tomorrow's potential today.
Although its current users are primarily software developers and multimedia specialists, QuickTime VR is neither restricted to, nor intended for these groups' use alone. In fact, the entire QuickTime VR production process was taught recently at Emory to a group of students, faculty, and staff in about four hours. At the end of this seminar, participants left with their own self-produced and fully functional QuickTime VR multi-node scenes.
QuickTime VR production consists of three basic elements: a camera, a tripod, and a computer. A digital camera or conventional SLR is mounted on a tripod with a special head which moves in preset, exact increments to capture a 360-degree panorama. These images are then either downloaded from the digital camera or scanned into the computer from slides or photographs. QuickTime VR software is used to combine the images into a single-node scene, which may be viewed individually or connected with other scenes using Director.
If the initial obstacles to producing QuickTime VR scenes still seem intimidating, consider the similar impediments one would encounter producing a Web Page. Both QuickTime VR production and Web Page production require a computer and special software--MPW, a high level scripting language helper application and HyperCard for the former, and HTML, for the later, and possibly Adobe Photoshop, an important application for dynamic Web development. The time needed to produce a QuickTime VR scene is roughly the same as that needed to create a Web Page, assuming the producer knows how to use MPW.
There are two costs indigenous to QuickTime VR production which are unnecessary with Web Page development: camera equipment which can cost anywhere from $150 to thousands of dollars depending on your needs, and extended RAM--at least 40 megabytes for the typical Macintosh computer.
How do we, as individual users, take advantage of the ease of this product in light of its cost? The answer is shared resources. This alone makes academia, and specifically Emory University, ideally situated to utilize new technologies such as QuickTime VR. Also, the diverse campus, a microcosmic society encompassing the liberal arts, science, medicine, and professional schools create a wealth of users eager to apply new tools to their own disciplines. In addition to sharing the costs of the resources, academic communities tend to share experience and knowledge as well. Skills are condensed and conveyed from user to user, such that each tool's utility increases with broader use. This is why Web production has proliferated at such a rapid rate.
It is amazing to consider how Apple's simple innovation on an existing technology stands to change communication entirely. And yet, like Edison's kinetoscope, QuickTime VR will no doubt also fade from memory, as it is the potential these tools represent and not the concept of an immutable, near perfect technology that make them significant. Certainly, a VR "brownie camera" would etch a more permanent mark in the brief history of reproductive technologies. And just as interactivity itself grows in the information technology world and becomes the standard medium for all communication, so will still and moving images rest with other analog artifacts.
Until VR-corders and virtual worlds replace camcorders and analog technology completely, QuickTime VR may serve a unique role as an intermediate tool, helping us to acclimate to an increasingly digital world in the same way that the Web prepares us for new modes of thinking and communication. With the release of Version II, expected in August--an enhancement which will enable the addition of fully-animated video images to the panoramic scene--Apple's QuickTime VR will forseeably dominate the first wave of construction on our future virtual worlds.
-
Previous Issues: Contents by Covers
Contents: Articles by Author
Contents: Articles by Date
Contents: Articles by Titles
Contents: Articles by Topics
How to Contribute Articles
Subscribing On-Line
POINT Staff & Accolades
POINT History
Emory E-Journals
Faculty Resources
Multimedia Exploration
Foreign Languages
Grants & Funding
Hot from the NewsWires
Standards
Electronic Citation