Reality Studio

Rating:
Updated: 24 Apr 2001 at 5:00 GMT, by James Rigg [Panoguide]

This review refers to version 1.0

Reality Studio has been available for some time now and is still a pretty amazing toolset. It combines the renowned panorama stitching capabilities of PhotoVista with a neat object movie tool (Object Modeler) and, perhaps most importantly, an amazingly feature-rich virtual world management tool (Reality Studio).

These together allow you to create high quality panoramas and assemble these together into virtual tours. Reality Studio doesn't just stop at allowing you to link panoramas together though, you can do any number of exciting things including:

* embed flat images into the panorama and make them interactive
* embed video (e.g. super-impose a video file on the front of a TV in a panorama and make it start and stop when the user clicks on a hotspot over the TV power button).
* embed sound and give it 3D positioning so that as the user pans the direction and intensity of the sound changes
* embed a scripted movie
* embed a Reality Studio object movie
* embed any VRML 2.0 object
* start, stop, show, hide any of the above from a hotspot

Images, object movies and scripted movies can have a mask defined so as to make the background of the image or object transparent - the effect is that they form part of the panorama and turn the whole user experience into a truly immersive one. And let's not forget that PhotoVista can create spherical projection panoramas - version 1.0 (as bundled with Reality Studio 1.0) supports the 8mm fisheye lens and can create full spherical panoramas allowing you to look vertically up and down**. So the user's experience becomes fully immersive.

Within minutes of using Reality Studio I had a beach scene with two people (object movies) standing in it , plus a bird flying around in the sky, and a dolphin occasionally jumping out of the water of the sea, oh and some music being played from amongst the trees, which fades away as I turn to the sea and hear the water lapping the shore... Can virtual worlds get much more immersive than this?

When it comes to exporting your virtual tour there is yet more good news: Reality Studio supports the FlashPix format, so you can have truly zoomable images. FlashPix images work similarly to interlaced GIFs, in that the user sees a blurry picture which gets gradually sharper. The really cool thing though, is that if you zoom in on a panorama it can become more detailed rather than grainier (up to the limit of the image) and because the image loads progressively you don't have to worry as much about the time to display. Having said that, ISeeMedia only recommend the FlashPix format be used with Live Picture Image Server or from local file system or CD.

When you export your finished tour, Reality Studio fills a directory with all the files required for the tour, in your chosen format - either for the ISeeMedia Zoom plugin, or for the Java version of it. Either way Reality Studio assumes you want to publish onto a web page (HTML), but you don't have to use the HTML it generates of course.

Enough of the good news, there's some bad news too. Well, sort of. You have to use the ISeeMedia Zoom software - you cannot publish your tour as QTVR or any other format. And Object Modeler and PhotoVista can only be used to create ISeeMedia Zoom format panoramas and objects and not QTVR. Also most of the exciting features - embedding sound, video, object movies and scripted movies, are supported by the plugin only and not by the Java viewers. This then restricts your publishing options, especially given the majority of web users don't have the Zoom plugin installed on their computers. By comparison the new PhotoVista Virtual Tour only allows output to a Java viewer, but all the extras such as embedded sound are supported by the new Java viewer.

Unless you have to use QuickTime for your tour, you should get Reality Studio.

** but the use of 8mm fisheye lenses with PhotoVista violates Interactive Pictures's patents. However you can also create spherical panoramas by exporting a panorama in cubic format and post-editing in a vertical "up" and "down" shot

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