Panoramas from Around
The University of Arizona

We made 4 panoramas of the Science Concourse by taking 10 to 12 adjacent photos at 4 different locations and stitching them together using MGI's PhotoVista version 1.0.  To date (July 18, 2000), a new version, 2.0, exists which appears to be better software. 

View the Panoramas:

While an MGI Zoom Viewer is recommended for best viewing, it is not necessary to view the panoramas.  A Java version is also available.  Slower browsers may wish to use the "Lite" versions of the panorama pages.

Plugin Version - faster, plugin required

Plugin Version "Lite" - smaller panoramas, less memory usage

Java Version - slower, no plugin necessary (Not recommended for Netscape users)

Java Version "Lite" - smaller panoramas, less memory usage

If you are having trouble seeing the panoramas, please read the Caveats below

Equipment:

Sony Mavica MVC-FD7 digital camera - price varies from $400 to $700.

Software:

MGI's PhotoVista - retails for $49.95

Process:

We went to each of these locations and took enough pictures to complete a full
circle. Then, back at the lab, we were able to texture the inside of a cylinder using the panorama in
PhotoVista. Since our camera holds approximately 25 JPEG-encoded images each, we were
able to get about two panoramas on each 1.4" floppy before returning to the lab to
process the images.

Some panoramas were created with the trial version of PhotoVista, and can be recognized
by the watermark, "created with PhotoVista".  Others were created after purchasing
PhotoVista and do not contain a watermark.

Some panoramas have been modified to simulate what the scene would look
like if a particular art scultpure were to be put in.

A large amount of grunt work went into the making of these webpages on account of several problems
I had with Netscape, which I will explain later under Caveats

Caveats:

The panoramas were very easy to make with the hardware and software we had available.  The tough part was putting it all together on the web.  Since Photovista is a DOS-based program that treats .IVR and .ivr the same, we had problems getting everything to work together when we uploaded the scene to our website, which is running Unix, which treats pan.IVR and pan.ivr as 2 distinct files.  In retrospect, I don't think I would have encountered any problems had I let PhotoVista leave the files with .IVR suffixes, but I simply changed all of the capital lettered suffixes to lower case just in case.

Netscape 4.x has problems with the Java version. I was unable to load the larger panoramas.  Netscape crashed repeatedly when viewing the smaller panoramas as well.  I found that closing the applet before it had finished loading or while it was scrolling caused Netscape to crash.

The most vulnerable time for a computer when viewing a panorama is while it is loading.  DO NOT SCROLL if the page is still being loaded.  While Internet Explorer is hardier than Netscape, I have also had Internet Explorer freeze up on occasion when trying to scroll while panorama was still loading.

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maintained by Aaryn Olsson (aaryn@ag.arizona.edu)