HotMedia
Average Rating:
HotMedia is a component of IBM's WebSphere Studio Homepage Builder and provides a sophisticated means of creating online presentations that include panoramas. |
Rating: 
Updated: 25 Oct 2004 at 6:08 GMT,
by Mark Revello
I have been using Mot Media V3.5 for almost two years now and think it's great. Especially for someone who does not like adding/editing lots of HTML and Java scripts by hand. I use it almost exclusively for virtual tours.
The end result is quite good. Though the larger you make the tour, the more jerky the auto-pan becomes. And sometimes you can get a vertical "line" through the image as it pans. If IBM could solve these minor glitches I would have given it 6 out of 6!
Rating:
Updated: 2 Jun 2001 at 3:00 GMT,
by James Rigg
[Panoguide]
This review refers to version 3.5 which was originally available for free
HotMedia is a simple authoring tool for creating Java based presentations including panoramas. You can create animations of images, display movies, VRML objects and display cylindrical panoramas as well as spherical iPIX movies. The first thing to understand is that generally you will create separate files for each 'node' in your presentation, and then when you add a hotspot to a panorama or still image, you specify which other file should be loaded. You can of course also link to a URL in order to go to a specific web page (which might, or might not, have another HotMedia or other presentation in it).
The size of the incredibly detailed manual in itself gives away the flexibility of HotMedia and what you can achieve with it. You can also extend it further if you know your HTML and JavaScript, and add additional interaction within the web page.
On the down side, HotMedia is not designed specifically for creating virtual tours, so it is not necessarily obvious how to use it to create a virtual tour. I also think it is a shame that it supports iPIX spherical movies but not other non-iPIX spherical panoramic images. HotMedia also relies heavily on JavaScript to allow to do customise any of the functionality - some kind of internal scripting might be nicer, although I realise that probably JavaScript is far more flexible.
HotMedia used to be free, but is no longer available on its own. To get it you must buy either IBM Studio Homepage Builder or IBM WebSphere Studio.