Historical:Interactive Panoramic Viewer

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Abstract

FreePV is part of the PanoTools Software Universe and is an effort to make a universal viewer for the different VR file formats. Thus these projects intend to add new features like basic support to new files and features like hotspots that are essential for the user interactive experience. One of the main objectives is to add a basic support to SPi-V file formats and better one for QTVR files to Linux users, where neither shockwave player nor Quicktime is avalaible, so the mozilla-plugin and glut freepv implementations should be able to read basic files to the end of this project.

Description

The first part of the project will consist in extending the libfreepv component, so it has a more flexible internal data structure to handle different panoramic formats, this internal data structure will help as an interface between the platform and the different file formants. With this data structure, you will need just to implement the file decoder module, which you desire. These modules should fill this internal data structure. At this moment PanoViewer (part of libfreepv) uses the QTVRDecoder data structure, but by the end of this project it should handle the QTVR file data through this more flexible data structure.

The second part will consist in adding a basic SPi-V XML file format support, this will consist in adding an XML parser and implementing the SPIVdecoder, which will fill the new data structure, for this purpose I will need to read in detail the SPi-V XML file format specification. To the end of this part, the viewer should be able to display basic SPi-V panoramas; at this point the decoder will handle data from the meta node.

The last part of the project will consist in enhance the user interactive experience adding the support to hotspots; this will enable the user to make a virtual tour, switching from one scenes to another by just clicking over the hotspots. This last feature should be supported for both QTVR and SPi-V file formats, in order to this I will need to check the Scene class, and design a component to handle the different scenes of a tour. Furthermore most of the hotspots in SPi-V are made with images that not necessarily are JPEG, so it will be needed to add support to files like png and gif.

The hotspots could be points, squares or polygons, for the design of the hotspot interface, it should contemplate these possible configurations, and I’ll need to check the EventListener class and to implement a basic collision detection algorithm. The hotspots will support basic events, like roll over and click. Taking advantage of the new image readers formats and the SPi-V file format, it would be nice to be able to display flat images with the panoramic views.

QTVR hotspots [1] SPi-V Panoelement (hotspots)[2]

Milestones

1. Make SPi-V file format avalaible for Linux/Unix users. 2. Add freepv support to Hotspots. 3. Add freepv support to load flat images.

Methodology

1. Planification 2. Design 3. Implementation 4. Testing period

Deliverables

Schedule

April 11: Begin a deeper familiarization with the project code, set up every thing (lib, compilers, etc…), so that I don’t have problems to begin coding.

April 23: Read articles, literature, papers and specifications, solve any doubt left with the mentors and the community.

May 9: Read with more detail the files specification and finally discuss with my mentors and the project community some implementation details.

May 28: Begin coding the data structure that most be part of the libfreepv component.

Jun 4: Begin coding the file decoder class using the XML parser and planing the new image readers (PNG,GIF).

Jun 18: Begin with the Testing period.

June 29: To this date the file decoders classes must be stable, be crossplataform and they should be well documented. Begin with the image readers implementation and begin the planification of hotspots.

July 9: Students upload code to code.google.com/hosting; mentors begin mid-term evaluations. I will begin codifing hotspot.

August 13: To this date the hotspots should work, be crossplataform and well documented.

August 20: Students upload code to code.google.com/hosting; mentors begin final evaluations; students begin final program evaluations

August 31: Final evaluation deadline; Google begins issuing student and mentoring organization payments