• move the mouse pointer to the middle of the panorama
• hold the mouse button down and drag in the direction you want to scroll
• small movements are best for slow and controllable scrolling
• press the SHIFT key to zoom in
• press the CTRL key to zoom out

The full screen panoramas are around 2-4MB in size. Depending on the speed of your internet connection, you may notice a delay while they load. This is the cost of being able to examine such high resolution images. A monochrome background does load initially to show you that activity is taking place.

Background

Quicktime Virtual Reality is a way of recording photographically a complete 360 degree view or panorama of a scene. This is done using a camera mounted on a special tripod head and taking a number of overlapping digital photographs. The images are stitched together in post-production to form one long panoramic photograph.

The panorama can then be used for printing, or it can be converted into a 'QTVR movie' which can be viewed interactively on a computer screen. Once the QTVR movie is loaded on a computer you see exactly what the camera saw, and can spin around and look at what you want to. You can also zoom in to examine parts of the scene in more detail. The effect of movement and zooming provides the viewer with an 'immersive' experience.

Viewing the panoramas

To view the VR panoramas, the QuickTime plugin is required. It can be downloaded free of charge from here: www.apple.com/quicktime/download. If you're using a Mac, there's also the option to view the panoramas using the PangeaVR plugin. This gives much smoother panning of the full screen movies. It can also be downloaded for free from www.pangeasoft.net/pano/plugin/downloads.html.