PTViewer

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History and Versions

PTViewer is the equirectangular and cylindrical panorama viewer originally distributed with the Panorama tools package. It currently is available in some different flavours:

  • The last version of PTViewer from Helmut Dersch before he closed his page is 2.5 and can be found on some Mirrors of this page.
  • At that time Helmut Dersch was working at version 2.6 that has only been available as a beta version. Its main feature was support for partial panoramic images (less than 360°).
  • PTViewer development moved to Sourceforge in 2003 but didn't yield reasonable results til now (?)
  • Fulvio Senore presented the first beta of his PTViewer version on 18 Jan 2004 which used a far better interpolator (Lanczos2, hence the version line was called 'L2') which is constantly developed since then now having reached Version 2.8 final on 7 Sept. 2006: See http://www.fsoft.it/panorama/ptviewer.htm for details.
    This line currently is the most sophisticated version of PTViewer for non-HDR panoramas, featuring very good image quality, dynamic slice loading, large viewer windows (up to fullscreen) and many other enhancements.
  • Around christmas 2003 Helmut Dersch introduced PTViewer 3 which as major new feature had HDR (high dynamic range) capabilites with a floating point extension to the JPEG format (called FJPG) and adaptive dynamic range in the viewer. This version has grown to 3.1.2 until now. See http://webuser.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/ for details.
  • 20 May 2004 he came out with PTViewerME, a version for PDAs and Mobile Devices running on J2ME, Sun's microedition runtime for the Java language. Details again on http://webuser.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/

Features

Since there are so many versions it's difficult to maintain a comprehensive list of features of PTViewer. I start with the slightly edited feature list found in the PTViewer 2.4 documentation (please correct and add):

  • Equirectangular and Cylindrical Panorama Playback: Horizontal field of view: 360°, Vertical field of view 0-180°.
  • Playback of Quicktime QTVR panoramas (Cylinders and Cubes) and Object movies (eventually using PTMViewer extension).
  • Display of rectilinear Images using optional PTZoom extension (not all versions)
  • Panning, tilting and zooming. Full navigation using either mouse or keyboard.
  • High Quality bilinear rendering as found in better plug-in viewers, even better Lanczos2 interpolation in the L2 version line.
  • Antialiasing for display of high resolution images.
  • Image and window size only limited by Java system memory.
  • Link any document to any point in the image using hotspots.
  • Configurable Controls in Appletwindow.
  • Complete VR-Tours in Browsers and Appletviewer.
  • Scriptable via html/javascript and internal scripting system
  • Tiny file size (25-70kByte) for fast download.
  • Package all files into one self-displaying tour using the JAR utility, see create a custom ptviewer jar file.
  • Display 3D-objects, Panorama Movies and animations using auxiliary helper applets included in the distribution.
  • Supports fast downloading low resolution preview panoramas and high resolution zoomable features (ROI).
  • Optional protection of panoramas and images by encryption.

Usage

On the panotools Mirrors or on Helmut Dersch's site you find a basic PTViewer documentation.

There are lots of PTViewer tutorials on the web. As a good starting point see the PTViewer section of Big Ben's Panorama Tutorials

The most comprehensive site on PTViewer (version 2.7L2 from Fulvio Senore) parameters, scripting and features is http://users2.ev1.net/~wufdog/PT/ (archive link)

Internal

There are some tutorials on the Wiki as well:

created by Erik Krause 16:39, 14 Apr 2005 (EDT)

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