Technische Beschreibung
VR-Film opens up the world to us in a way hitherto unknown, by allowing people to visit almost any place from practically any location without time constraints. It is a media drawing upon traditional photography and film industry. It depicts more than a photo but without the time limits of a movie. It is an interactive media meaning that the audience is active. The audience gives life to the film by viewing it from various angles, zooming in/out and clicking hyperlinks/icons. It is also a very "light" and practical media. One person with skills and a backpack is enough to cover any site in the world. For this reason, it is inexpensive to produce compared to other animated systems. Moreover, it is a broad-ranging medium insofar as it can be supported on many different media systems, from a light web interface to heavy cinema productions or any printing support and at any quality level.
Taking a selection of digital images, each VR film is made by stitching together 24 of these images. The computer creates the effect of being inside a sphere, giving the user the scope to view all around oneself at 360 x 180 degrees. In fact, this "sphere" is made with the six separate sides of a cube: the front, right, back, left, top, and bottom sides. The borders of each side connect to the others and the illusion is perfect. For the WHTour, all VR films are produced on site with a laptop and then disseminated on the Internet through local connections. Each VR is a 1/2 to 2 days postproduction according to the complexity of stitching.
Hardware / Software
Dupret's only equipment is a monopod, Nikon 4500 with wide lens and his Titanium PowerBook, to which he transfers his digital images to on the fly. For postproduction and dissemination online, he uses Realviz Stitcher 3.5, Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Adobe GoLive 6.0 and Apple QuickTime 6.
Applications:
Every film or picture is available for any purpose that remains within the ethos and philosophy of the WHTour: publications, exhibitions, projections, digital world, film and video documentaries, printed or interactive encyclopedias, etc. As a digital media, images can be transferred on film, DVD, CD-Rom and any digital support: VR films can be animated on request for the cinema, television, DVD or any other video format. Furthermore, digital binoculars can be used and enable people to pan and tilt VR films with the head or hand motion so that the immersion is complete. These binoculars are ideal for digital exhibitions.