Panorama player comparisons
What panorama players are available? How does the choice of player affect the way a panorama performs? Is the image rendered differently? How long does it take to load? These examples show over a dozen different panorama players, each using basic settings and copies of the same source images, to help find answers to questions such as these.
The panorama players shown here include the venerable (but possibly fading) QuickTime VR itself, a number of Flash and Java-based players (well-known and otherwise), Shockwave, some entirely custom-coded engines, and one that uses Microsoft's Silverlight platform. Among these are the best in the panorama industry, although it is up to you to decide which those are.
About the tests:
There are three sets of Panorama Comparisons. The 'Large' examples use panoramic image data that totals approximately 3,000,000 bytes (around 2.9MB). Equirectangular images are 8000x4000px, and cubefaces are 2309px square. This is larger than is needed for a panorama shown at the 800x600px sizes used here, but it allows for use in full-screen mode as well. The 'Medium' examples use image data in 6000x3000px equirectangular and 1732px cubeface sizes, while the 'Small' examples use image data in 4000x2000px equirectangular and 1155px cubeface sizes.
The image sets were compressed to JPEG using Pano2VR's 50% quality level, or the setting that produced the nearest equivalent data size for tools that compressed the data as part of the production workflow. This minimises JPEG artifacts, although it does produce slightly larger downloads than would normally be desired.
You can download the images for your own tests here, but photo copyright is retained. Contact me before republishing.
Important note: the large panorama samples require more memory than Java versions 1.6.0.10 and older can provide for display, so some visitors (including those with standard installations of Mac OS X 10.5) will not be able to see Java-based examples. Current versions of Mac OS X don't have this limitation.
The Panorama Comparison team and contributors (in alphabetical order):
Patrick Cheatham
Jürgen Eidt
Paulo Fernandes
Trausti Hraunfjord
Ben Kenyon
Keith Martin
Armando Saenz
Fulvio Senore
Jim Smoother
Ken Warner
