Tile loading for pictures

[geoionescu]

Hello dear Denis,

would it be possible to add a 'tile-loading' functionality for Flash Panoramas Player?

I'd love to see in Flash Panoramas the functionality similar to Microsoft's HD View, the main reason for this being to enchance user experience by not having to wait for the full panorama to load before they can start interacting with it.

The process could be something like this:

1. A tool which takes a set of pictures and breaks it into tiles.
2. The player loads those tiles 'on-demand', e.g. only the visible tiles are loaded at first, after that the user can explore the panorama and the necessary tiles are loaded in background and displayed as soon as they load.

This could make possible loading of huge panoramas by specifying different resolution panoramas depending on the zoom level.

Hoping that this suggestion is taken into account for the next version of the player,

Sincerely,
George Ionescu

[HansNyberg]

That already exists.

If you use the new movdecoder to load QTVR movies you can ad any tiling you want.
Just make a QTVR with tiling for example 3x3, 5x5 and you have almost instant view just like you have in Quicktime.
Here is a testpano.
http://www.panoramas.dk/examples/cubeqtvr3.html

Hans

[cheathamlane]

Hey Hans -- totally off-topic here... What'd you shoot that pano with (lens/camera)? Just curious.

I may have to modify a recent post I just made -- I've been experiencing horribly slow load times for parsed MOVs; yours loaded up pretty quick.

Cheers,

[HansNyberg]

Canon 5D + Canon 15mm which I BTW smashed into a stone a couple of days after. Sunshade bent close to the lens and Focus got stuck at 1m. My repair hop told me they got it working (manual focus) but meanwhile I bought a Tokina 10-17mm.

Are you sure you have removed the parameters for loading tests.
loaderBandwidth = 50 means you load as a 512 DSL
Many people still have that so its very nice to be able to check how they get it.

Hans

[Scott Witte]

Actually, I think George is asking for a feature more like zoomify than the preview track of QTVR.

[Stephmw]

Possibly :-) I'd made a similar request before purchasing FPP (here (http://flashpanoramas.com/forum/showthread.php?t=490))...

[cheathamlane]

Possibly :-) I'd made a similar request before purchasing FPP (here (http://flashpanoramas.com/forum/showthread.php?t=490))...

Well, the plus side to something like the Zoomify tiling pyramid is faster initial download times -- but just think how laborious it would be to navigate a 360° panorama using that method... slooowww as your browser and Flash tried to keep up with your pan/tilt/zoom movements.

Zoomify has pretty much abandoned development of a VR panorama or object viewer -- from discussions I had with Zoomify, it pretty much boiled down to the "smart" pre-caching of the elements. Imagine panning while zoomed all the way in -- you get to see very low-res data until the high-res tiles load. No fun!

[Stephmw]

Of course, panning while zoomed to the maximum setting will show unzoomed data until the tiles are loaded...

but as it stands at the moment, if you zoom in to that depth all you get is pixelated blur anyway!

So, I'm not saying we should remove the use of a single image (or QTVR) for the top level image, but when you go past a particular zoom level, it would be nice to allow tiles to be loaded if more detail was actually available.

From watching my over my friend's shoulders when they use zoomify on Scott Howard's megapixel machu pichu (http://www.docbert.org/MP/) image, I have a basic idea of the usage pattern:

zoom in to max zoom on interesting feature
pan around feature to get context (~1 width around feature)
zoom out to find next interesting feature...


And of course, the beauty of only using tiles once past a certain zoom is that you can be selective. Add a mouseover hotspot highlight to indicate high-res areas and you can feel free to avoid that level of detail anywhere else...

[zleifr]

stephmw: the max zoom value is 3 so that will always be a limitation unless Denis changes it. Also, if you get creative there are some ways to work with what we have to effectively get what you want:

1. make the actual pano sides have areas with greater detail: in photoshop, start with hi-res image, duplicate it, halve the resolution without change the size (ie, no resampling), copy hi-res image onto new layer above lo-res image, delete areas of no interest in hi-res image, flatten, save.

The jpeg compression should be pretty good with the lo-res parts, and so the overall size shouldn't double.