PhotoVista Virtual Tour

Product version: PhotoVista Virtual Tour v. 1.0

Virtual Tour's job is to help you manage a virtual tour and set up all the links between panoramas and objects

For each "location" (whether a panorama or simply a 2D image) you can set various properties and also see a summary view of the links from this image to others and from other images to this one. Note you can assign a background sound effect to a panorama as well as specify that it should start spinning when loaded.

When you create or edit a hotspot in an image, panorama or object, you can set where the hotspot will go

You can then specify whether the transition from one image to another is a cut or a zoom and pan...

...You can specify that the hotspot will pan and zoom to a particular point in the image/panorama before leaving, and then enter the target panorama or object at a specific point:

...Alternatively clicking on the hotspot will just cut straight into the target, but you can still specify where you enter a target panorama:

If you add a hotspot to an object movie, you can set the hotspot to exist in only one frame or in all frames. For example if you have an object movie of a vase on a table, you might want the user to be able to 'go back' to the panorama of the room by clicking on the table in any of the frames. However to see a close-up of the ornate detail of the painting on the back of the vase, you have to click in one or two specific frames that show the painting.

Instead of the hotspot simply appearing as a box, you can hide the box or use your own image to highlight the hotspot within the panorama or object:

Before you publish your finished tour, you can at any time preview it. PhotoVista Virtual Tour will then create the HTML and other files required and then launch a web browser for you to see the tour in. Note that PhotoVista Virtual Tour comes with a light-weight version of ISeeMedia Zoom Image Server so you can test out your zoomable FlashPix panoramas and objects before publishing them to a Zoom Image Server.

Once you are happy you can publish your tour. If you specify FlashPix zoomable image format, PhotoVista Virtual Tour can publish the tour directly to an ISeeMedia Zoom Image Server (if you have one)...

...alternatively you can just publish the images as JPEGs. Note that either way you can set the viewer size and image sizes. This provides a neat way of being able to output multiple sizes of images so as to create a 'broadband tour' and perhaps a 'home modem tour' or similar, from which your users can choose.