Panorama Viewers

There are basically three types of viewers for spherical panoramas:

• Java based Viewers run on any platform that supports Java.
• Plugin based viewers require a plugin (Quicktime, Shockwave) to run and might be platform specific.
• Stand alone viewers that are executables for a specific platform.

Java based Viewers

Free

• First and until now most versatile is PTViewer developed originally by Helmut Dersch and now maintained and enhanced by Fulvio Senore
• Immervision G2 - very promising but still beta.

Commercial

There are some commercial Java based viewers. Most of them are either a PTViewer clone or less functional. (Please add something about commercial Java viewers)

Plugin based Viewers

• Quicktime is available for Apple Macintosh and Windows. Requires panorama in QTVR movie format. (PanoCube or Pano2QTVR convert from equirectangular to .mov on Windows)

• PangeaVR is a viewer for Mac OSX only that displays both cubic QuickTime-VR panoramas in QTVR movie format and equirectangular (spherical) JPEG panoramas by Brian Greenstone. See http://www.pangeasoft.net/pano/plugin/pangeavr.html for details.

• SPi-V is a very sophisticated and smooth viewer based on Macromedia Shockwave that handles panoramas completely in graphics card memory.

Stand alone Viewers

• FSPViewer is a free hardware accelerated stand alone viewer by Fulvio Senore (Windows only).
• panoglview is an Open Source hardware accelerated stand alone viewer for Equirectangular Projection images (Windows, Linux and OS X).
• panoviewer is an Open Source stand-alone viewer now superceded by panoglview (Windows, Linux).
• PTViewer, the original standalone viewer created by Helmut Dersch in C for X-Windows available from one of the mirrors (Linux).
• Quicktime also works as a standalone vewer (Windows, OS X).