Panorama Viewers
Revision as of 22:38, 12 February 2008 by Erik Krause (talk | contribs) (→Stand alone Viewers: platforms)
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
- Panorado Applet - a free java viewer applet - "flat" view, but very fast, thus suited for larger images.
Commercial
There are some commercial Java based viewers. Most of them are either a PTViewer clone or less functional.
- Immervision Pure Player.
Plugin based Viewers
Free
- Quicktime is available for Apple Macintosh and Windows. Requires panorama in QTVR movie format. (PanoCube or Pano2QTVR convert from equirectangular to .mov on Windows)
- SPi-V is a very sophisticated and smooth viewer based on Macromedia Shockwave that handles panoramas completely in graphics card memory (free version with logo).
- DevalVR is a windows plugin for viewing panoramic content.
Commercial
- 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.
- The Flash Panorama Player is a cross-platform viewer that displays QTVR movies as well as equirectangular (spherical) and cylindrical panoramas. Cube faces and stripes can also be handled. It supports SWF-plugins to extend its functionality (for example to integrate distorted FLV-movies as hotspots).
- Pano2VR (former Pano2QTVR) creates Flash 9 SWF files with included spherical viewer.
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).
panovieweris an Open Source stand-alone viewer now superceded by panoglview (Windows, Linux).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) or the 3.2 version in compiled Java from his page (Windows).
- Quicktime also works as a standalone viewer (Windows, Mac).
- DevalVR has a stand alone version, too (Windows).
- Panorado is a full-featured image viewer/browser supporting panoramas (JPEG & QTVR). Shareware. (Windows)