VR Worx
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Updated: 5 Jan 2001 at 5:00 GMT,
by James Rigg
[Panoguide]
This is a review of version 2.0
The VR Worx is a suite verson of the three VR Toolbox products VR PanoWorx, VR ObjectWorx and VR SceneWorx with a few enhancements to each. It offers the only real alternative to the full functionality of QTVR Authoring Studio - a complete set of tools for creating QuickTime movies and linking them all together into a virtual world. The added bonus is that all the VR Toolbox products are available for PC as well as Mac (unlike QTVR AS).
As has been noted in the individual reviews, the interfaces are a little clunky in places, but I guess you get used to the quirks of whatever software you choose to use. The only particularly annoying bit of the interface is the manual alignment of images in the panorama module. Unfortunately manual alignment is achieved by clicking on virtual cursor keys in the interface. A single click moves the image 1 pixel, so if you are using very high resolution images this interface can be extremely slow and frustrating. Shame there's no zoom function either with which to achieve the best alignment.
Performance is similar to each of the free-standing versions of the modules. VR Worx offers a few advantages for panorama stitching (adjust tilt and image centre) and object movie creation (adjust image centre, cropping and frame position), and gives finer controls over post-processing panoramas (more filters and better control of filters such as sharpen). VR Worx 2.0 adds direct video support in the PC version (in version 1.0 it was Mac only) plus more effects now in the Transition Generator. The Object module now has an extra effect: Matte, which allows you to remove the background using colours or an image and then insert either a colour, pattern, still image or even a QTVR panorama. VR Worx 2.0 is also now scriptable (AppleScript on MacOS, VBScript on the PC).
Stitching in the panorama module now has a "Hyperstitch" option which runs faster. However I found that the panorama module produced results similar to those in the PanoWorx v1.02 tests. As with both version 1.0 and VR PanoWorx 1.02, The VR Worx 2.0 still has bugs on the PC and can be temperamental. In all the modules I intermittently got an error message " ^0 " which has to win the award for being the most meaningless error ever. The VR Worx 2.0 still shows the tell-tale signs of being software developed for Mac and ported to PC.
As with each of the free-standing versions of the modules, VR Worx's strength is its support of the QuickTime VR format. Most image stitching software merely supports exporting a QTVR movie. The VR Worx supports many of the additional features (including hotspots) and gives you a very clear and simple way of choosing different settings for your QTVR movies. In version 2.0 VR Toolbox have added yet more features to enhance the QTVRs you can create.
However my tests have shown problems with image stitching performance and bugs in the PC version (I have not had time to review the Mac version for comparison). VR Worx is not the best when it comes to panorama stitching, but it is a great toolset overall because of its QTVR features.