The viewers of the spherical 3D panoramas and virtual tours

In order to view the spherical 360 panoramas and virtual tours on the Internet one is required to install at least one of the plug-ins for the Internet browser for the 3D panorama viewing. If you don’t have any, then when opening the web page, which includes the spherical 3D panorama, you will be offered to download and install the player which corresponds with the panorama’s format. After the consent for the installation, the plug-in will be downloaded and installed automatically.

 

Thus far the most widespread viewer of the spherical 3d panoramas and 360 virtual tours is the Flash Player. Owing to the definite improvement of the videos’ playback quality in the latest versions of the program, Flash started to actively push out such a traditional programs for viewing the VR panoramas, as QuickTime, Deval VR, Java and the other ones. The Shockwave Player, which is notable for the very smooth image motion, also occupies the leading positions recently.

 

All the abovementioned programs for viewing the 3D panoramas and virtual tours can view the panoramas in the “full screen” mode and are distributed for free (you can find the links here).

 

The viewing of the virtual tours and spherical 3D panoramas from CD or from the hard disk drive is possible using the Internet browser as well as using the so-called standalone player. All the abovementioned viewers exist in 2 versions – as a plug-in and as a standalone player.

QuickTime is a versatile multimedia player developed by Apple Inc. QuickTime was the first player (since 1995), which was able to view the panoramas in the QTVR (QuickTime Virtual Reality) format. Worth mentioning is the fact, that back then the QTVR format supported only the cylindrical panoramas. QuickTime also was the first viewer of the spherical 360 panoramas and virtual tours, which gave the viewers an opportunity to view them in the full screen mode.
QuickTime can also reproduce the number of other formats, including the non-multimedia ones, for example MP3, GIF, TIFF, AAC, PSD and the others. Besides, QuickTime has a plug-in for viewing videos in the Internet browser as well as the Streaming Server, Broadcaster, the new H.264 codec and a lot of other useful functions.

	–	QTVR is the standard, common format of the 3D spherical and cylindrical panoramas
	–	Installed on 100% of Apple computers and on more, than 60% PCs with Windows OS.
	–	High playback quality even in the “full screen” mode
	–	The ability to add the «sprites» to the panorama (animation, pop-up windows with text, sound, etc.)
	–	Large player size (21 МБ)
	–	Some firewall set-ups can block QuickTime
	–	Incompatibility with Windows 64bit
	–	Limited capacities of authoring

Download QuickTime
Watch the example of the spherical 360 panorama QTVR format
Check if QuickTime is already installed on your computer (or identify the installed version)

DevalVR is the definite leader among the viewers of the virtual 3D panoramas when comparing the quality of the panoramic content’s playback. DevalVR is designed to view the virtual panoramas in QTVR (QuickTime Virtual Reality) format. DevalVR offers almost ideal smoothness of movement without the pixellation. One more advantage of the DevalVR plug-in is its small size (approximately 300 KB), so the download takes only a couple of seconds. 

DevalVR has not very well-known, but quite interesting tool “Loop”. It can’t be found on the pop-up tool panel, but can be activated by pressing the SHIFT button.

	–	The exceptional smoothness of the 360 panoramas playback, even of the full screen ones.
	–	Small plugin size (~0.3 MB)
	–	The minimum system requirements are not as high as, for example, Flash and Java have
	–	Doesn’t require installation.
	–	For Windows only
	–	Uncommon among the PC users

Download DevalVR
Watch the example of the spherical 3d panorama with DevalVR plugin
Check if DevalVR is already installed on your computer (or identify the installed version)

Flash is a graphics program, developed by Adobe (formerly Macromedia). It is used mainly for the interactive animation, presentations and games creation (mainly for the Internet). Flash uses its own advanced programming language ActionScript, which makes it possible to use all the potential of interactive animation and to develop large-scale flash applications.
Adobe Flash Player is the most widespread plug-in (for all kinds of operating systems), which can view the interactive multimedia presentations, videos, graphics, animation and, of course, the VR 360 panoramas. Adobe Flash Player is installed on 99% of computers, which have access to the Internet. Flash Player’s mass popularity and almost not limited capabilities are the advantages of the spherical 3D panoramas and virtual tours, which are made with Flash technology. Today Flash is becoming the common format for the presentations, that’s why one can say, that Flash is a crucial addition to Internet browser.
Before the arrival of flash player’s version 9 the viewing of 3D panoramas on the base of Flash was extremely inconvenient because of the slowness of the playback and the wave-like panorama distortion when doing the image scrolling.
The up to date version 10 of the player provides the viewer with the high quality playback of even the full screen panoramas, but it doesn’t provide users with such a smoothness of motion as the panoramas made on the DevalVR, Shockwave and QTVR technology do.
The modern 3d spherical panoramas in the Flash format make the use of many interactive instruments possible – active zones (hotspots), sound, video, maps with radar, pop-up windows and many more gadgets, which enrich and decorate your virtual tours.

Java is a programming language, which is capable of making different patterns (applets), including the applets for the panorama viewing. Java was developed by Sun Microsystems, firstly as a means for household appliances controlling. What is special about the Java language? Firstly, Java is separate from the operating system. It means that the same code can work on several different platforms. Actually, Java is an interpreted language; therefore, for launching the applet on Java language, one must have the interpreter of that language installed on his or her computer - Java Runtime Environment (JRE). JRE is a default program on 100% of Apple computers. Computers with Windows operating system have JRE installed up until XP SP1 version inclusively. When installing the Win XP SP2 or higher, JRE should be installed additionally, because now Windows considers it unreliable and dangerous.

Microsoft offers their own virtual machine for Windows - Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which is capable of launching the Java applets. The size of JVM is much smaller in comparison with JRE (~5 MB vs. ~145 MB). In the past the main drawback of the Java applets (PTViewer, for example) was that they were able to view only small-sized VR 360 panoramas. The reason for that was the low limit of Java memory.

These days the most popular 3D panorama and virtual tour viewer for the Java-machine is the ImmerVision PurePlayer. This is the only player for Java, which makes it possible to view the spherical 3D panoramas in the full screen mode. But its playback quality is not so good as the playback quality of  QuickTime VR and DevalVR.

	–	Supported by many platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris)
	–	Large interactive abilities, before the appearance of Flash 9, the best virtual tours were made with Java technology.
	–	Smooth standard (not full screen) panorama rendering and sharpness.
	–	Java is installed in some browsers on default
	–	The absence of Java in WinXP SP2 and Vista (from the point of view of security)
	–	The absence of Java in WinXP SP2 and Vista
	–	Large size of Java Runtime Environment (~145 MB)

Install Java
Watch the example of  the Java-based 360 panorama
Check if Java is already installed on your computer (or identify the installed version)
Install Java Virtual Machine (JVM)

Shockwave is a multimedia player, developed by Adobe (formerly Macromedia), primarily intended for viewing the large-scale presentations, games, etc. But Shockwave copes with viewing of the 3D panoramas very well also.

	–	Smoothness of movement and absence of artifacts at the time of movement
	–	Interactivity, the ability to add the hotspots

Download Shockwave Player
Watch the example of  the Shockwave 3d panorama
Check if Shockwave Player is already installed on your computer (or identify the installed version)