Apple's forgotten virtual-reality project QuickTime VR | Hacker News Reader

Apple's forgotten virtual-reality project QuickTime VR

businessinsider.com

84 pointsjonbaer43 comments

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/ . 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.

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/ and 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!

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.

Great story! Also: I bet that domain name would be worth something to someone.

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...

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

Man, I remember that game. Starship Creator was also a ton of fun.

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.

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

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 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 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!

'drawing is done with a thing called GL'

very historical

It will soon be released as OpenGL on PC too, so you may give it a try!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

On Windows it's always been terrible. The Mac frameworks are pretty solid.

Guessing you never directly programmed such frameworks. Back in the day, writing multimedia for Windows was a nightmare... especially if you wanted to do things like play multiple videos in sync with a common master clock. QuickTime was the only way to do it reasonably.

Nope, I thankfully never had to do this for Windows, but I can imagine your pain!

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.

>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?

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).

No, QuickTime only has problems opening, exporting, crashing and doing other things -

https://www.google.com/search?q=quicktime+crash+error+site%3...

On PC I've always associated it with not being able to full screen a video and bad play/pause/rewind/FF controls.

The player was crappy, but the actual framework was great. I believe the file format formed the basis of MPEG4.

Looks like it was. https://developer.apple.com/standards/classicquicktime.html

Quicktime still is the standard in professional video. Everybody uses QuickTime and Apple prores codecs.

As many, from the average 90s Windows user, QT was just an awkward penguin plugin. It "felt" outdated even in these days.

For programmers or for users?

As a user - the QuickTime UX sucked like most other Apple software and I'm glad that nobody uses it anymore for things that I need to look at.

All I remember is the spammy nag screens every time it was updated: "Why not buy Quicktime Pro?" and Apple's hideous brushed steel UI which often didn't quiet render correctly.

isn't the MPEG4 container based on the Quicktime container?

Pretty much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_14

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.

$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.

oh man GraphicConverter was awesome!

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com