Speaking of stiching software, I’ve been using hugin and I will still continue to do that (although on an almost unrelated note I’m kinda mad that the free software PTLense is now charging but not that much) however I found a beta of an upcoming pay software from Microsoft. Acrylic Well it was code named Acrylic and thats what I used but I believe it will now be apart of Microsoft Design which also has a demo.

If there is one thing I can see is that the photo stitching is awesome! It corrects *some* visual distortion, color and uuummm….. I can’t remember the term, its where you image on its edges darken in a reverse circular pattern. It did a vastly better job of anything I’ve ever done in hugin. I’ve never mastered (or even done like in the sample picture) stretching of shots that don’t line up exactly but that program does!

That isn’t to say that it can eliminate parallaxing errors. It is for windows but check out the demo!

To answer a couple of questions: yes, the VR means virtual reality. When we chose the name (getting on for seven years ago) it was short for “Clementine VR”, Clementine being our company name. It was also meant to be analogous to Quicktime VR, as that was what we used for our stuff at the time. Which leads me onto the other question. This could really fill a whole post, but I’ll summarise.

We used QTVR for everything until last year, when we finally had had enough with its clunkiness and inflexibility. Apple seems to have abandoned updating it, which doesn’t help. Moving to our own Flash-based viewer had a number of major benefits. Firstly, it gave us a lot more flexibility in adding features, such as different types of hotspots. Secondly, it freed us from having to convert everything to .mov every time anything changed. Our server did handle all of that stuff in the background, so when a user made a change to a hotspot it rebuilt it, but it was never ideal. And of course, most other software doesn’t handle it that easily. The new viewer lets us keep everything as JPEG, with hotspots as XML rather than the hack that QTVR uses (Graphics codec - ugh).

Finally there’s the plug-in issue. Flash has by far the largest install base of any plug-in, and if the version is too old, then it has a very slick self-update mechanism. QuickTime, in contrast, is a real pain, and despite iTunes etc still has a much lower install base. When we used it, many of our clients wanted us to include our Java viewer too, as so many users didn’t have QTVR. So, we’re so much happier since we ditched QTVR.

I’ve got qtvr installed, it’s just been on so long I assumed it was a normal component of quicktime. I checked and it’s apparently not.

quicktime VR costs money possibly?

Did you notice any differences between using this vs Quicktime VR? Is there some great big glaring discrepancy I’m missing?