PhotoVista Virtual Tour

Rating:
Updated: 4 Oct 2004 at 17:10 GMT, by Kevin Johnston

Photovista virtual Tour 3.0

I liked the trial version of Photovista Panorama and was impressed at how well it stitched my images together.

Prior to purchasing the full Version of Virtual Tour 3.0 software I had several questions into their helpdesk that were not answered in a timely manner. For instance, I needed clarification on their business licencing agreement. (I have now been informed that the business edition licence agreement no longer exists. I was told this after I purchased the Business Edition.)

I purchased the software despite my misgivings about their support line and am now regretting my decision. I've had several questions and problems with the software as I am not a computer "tech" but my queries to their help desk go unanswered.

Presently I feel frustrated as I need to get samples together and a website running in a short period of time. I may have to switch to another software provider in order to get my virtual tour busines operational.

I would not recommend this product to "non-techies" as their customer support has proven to be very poor.

Thank you.

Kevin Johnston

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Rating:
Updated: 24 Apr 2000 at 5:00 GMT, by James Rigg [Panoguide]

This review refers to version 1.0

PhotoVista Virtual Tour combines PhotoVista Panorama with PhotoVista 3D Objects and a Virtual Tour Maker to provide you with the means to create high quality panoramas and object movies, and to combine these into interactive virtual tours.

The ability to create Image Worlds format virtual tours also exists in the older Reality Studio product, but there are some key differences. Firstly, in Virtual Tour object movies are treated as freestanding elements of a tour (as they are by most other software) so object movies do not appear within the panorama (which they do in Reality Studio). Instead to see an object movie, you link the panorama to the object and it will appear separately. Unfortunately the same applies to 2D movies and images, which must be viewed outside of a panorama. Sound however can incorporated into both panoramas and object movies, although you cannot define directional sound (i.e. sound that gets louder or quieter depending on the direction in which you are facing within the scene).

PhotoVista Virtual Tour is designed to create virtual tours exclusively for the new Zoom Java applets that are supplied with it. These applets use a new (different) XML based Image Worlds format command file for the entire tour, instead of the old Live Picture VRML based Image Worlds files (one required per node). The advantage of the new viewer is that the web page needn't be reloaded when the user clicks on a hotspot to go from one location to another.

PhotoVista Virtual Tour joins is sister software PhotoVista and PhotoVista 3D Objects in providing a wealth of functionality and a very easy to use interface. There are some subtle improvements to functionality over Reality Studio, such as being able to display some descriptive pop-up text when the mouse moves over a hotspot (aka a "tool tip") and being able to customise how a hotspot appears in the scene. Although object movies cannot be embedded within a panorama, you can now define hotspots and interaction with objects themselves, which you could not do before, and you can export all of these things to a Java applet viewer.

PhotoVista Virtual Tour also includes a light weight version of Zoom Image Server so that if you are publishing high resolution FlashPix zoomable panoramas and objects you can test them out on your local machine without having to upload them onto your Zoom Image Server. And of course this means that if you don't yet have a Zoom Image Server, you can try out the functionality and see for yourself the benefits of being able to zoom into detail in a panorama or object without pixelation. PhotoVista Virtual Tour can also publish your virtual tour onto your Zoom Image Server all for you, just to make your life easier.

If you do not have Zoom Image Server, PhotoVista Virtual Tour can still create all the HTML and code and files needed (including re-sizing your images to all be the same size if you want). All you then have to do is do any customisations you want to do before copying all the files up onto your web server.

Although there are some things that Reality Studio can do that PhotoVista Virtual Tour cannot, these are all things that are only supported by the Zoom plugin, which, to be honest, most web users do not have installed on their computers. There is no official statement on the future of Reality Studio, and its future cetrainly looked uncertain under MGI Software. Now that ISeeMedia owns Reality Studio we shall have to wait to see whether Reality Studio will be dropped in favour of PhotoVista Virtual Tour.

The single biggest disadvantage of PhotoVista Virtual Tour is that it can only output virtual tours ready to be used with the new version of the Zoom Java viewers which weigh in at a very hefty 67Kb (JPEG) or an even heftier 87Kb for the FlashPix capable Java viewer. By comparison the existing Java viewers for use with the old Live Picture VRML based Image Worlds objects and panoramas weigh in at between 40 and 57Kb. Although "broadband" (ADSL, DSL, XDSL) is becoming more common in some countries, I still think it is prudent to keep file sizes low to ensure fast downloads and to ensure users don't get bored. 67Kb seems too much to me...

PhotoVista Virtual Tour offers a very rich amount of functionality, very good image stitching in PhotoVista Panorama and great object movie capabilities in PhotoVista 3D Objects and great virtual tour authoring. It is simple and easy to use and combines all of the normal features of such software together with some less common features such as sound and customisable hotspots. It is also offered at a very competitive price that I think correctly reflects its advantages over Reality Studio (which is cheaper). However it is a shame that the only output option is to a new dedicated Java viewer that is pretty heavy and therefore slow to download.

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