P a n o r a m a s

How to make them

Check out my tutorial on Panoramas in WCS 5.

How to view them as QTVR movies

If you're using a Mac, there's the free QTVR Make Panorama 2. Open your IFF in Photoshop, rotate it 90º CCW, and save it as a PICT. Bring it into QTVR Make Panorama 2, adjust settings, and create the QTVR pano. With the right settings this yields a good quality pano for free.

For the PC, VRToolbox sells VRPanoWorx. A demo is available and will easily import the IFF pano for viewing, but not saving. I've heard very good things about the VRToolbox app.

The Panorama Factory is shareware. While it isn't designed for importing single pano images, I was able to export a QTVR movie with the following steps. The resulting test pano was of a lesser quality than the Mac QTVR Make Panorama 2 movie, but it was a QTVR.

1. Crop the WCS pano into a left and right half, save as BMPs.
2. Launch PF Wizard, Import.
3. Multiple-select the 2 half images.
4. Wizard Step 2. Select APS panoramic print, deselect Refine focal length...
5. Wizard Step 3. Select QTVR pano type.
6. Wizard Step 4. Max size, no thumbnail.
7. Wizard Step 5. Save final image.

These are a just a few of the pano tools available. A Google search for "panorama software" will yield a bunch more.