A Kaidan 360 One VR mirror was used to take a panoramic photograph of a construction site. Adobe Photoshop was used to place icons on the donut-shaped image that the mirror produces. The icons were flipped horizontally in Photoshop because the donut-shaped image is a mirror image. The edited donut-shaped image was then imported into the PhotoWarp software that is supplied with the 360 One VR mirror to create a QuickTime panoramic movie.
Object Movie
We photographed a Surveying Level on a Kaidan multi-row object movie turnatable to create an object movie with five-rows and 18 columns (i.e. a 20-degree horizontal interval). Then in Photoshop we created four icons on each of the 90 frames. We used a VRWorx object movie file to create a QuickTime object movie from these 90 frames.
Setting the Initial View of a VRWorx Object Movie
If you have 18 still images numbered sequentially, the 10th image will be set as the initial view when the movie is exported from VRWork as QuickTimeVR. There is an option to reset the initial view in VRWork, however doing this often causes faulty QuickTimeVR output, even after going back to the Compose tab and clicking Build and then exporting the movie again. To obtain your required initial view without having to renumber all the still images, choose your initial view on the object movie turnatable, then rotate the turnatable through 180 degrees and start taking photos from this point.
Putting It All Together
We created a VRWorx Scene file and imported our panoramic movie of the construction site. We then imported our Surveying Level object movie and our detailed still photographs. Each item that is imported into a VRWorx Scene file is known as a ‘node’. We linked the Surveying Level object movie and the detailed still photographs to the panoramic movie using a VRWorx nodes linking tool. We created hot spots within the nodes and set the properties of the hot spots using the Node Browser window that appears when you double-click a hotspot.
Maximum Number of Hotspots in a VRWorx Scene File
The Surveying Level object movie has four icons in each of its 90 frames, giving a total of 360 icons. We found that when the number of hotspots in the VRWorx Scene file exceeded about 270, when we then created further hotspots, other hotspots would delete themselves or link themselves to other hotspots. The VRWorx Technical Support web pages state that the maximum number of hotspots that can be created in a VRWorx file is 254.
The solution we found to this problem was to remove the Surveying Level object movie from the VRWorx Scene file. We then opened the VRWorx object movie file with which we had earlier created the Surveying Level object movie and we created each of the four hotspots on one frame. We then copied and pasted them into the other frames as we had done in the VRWorx Scene file. But whereas in a VRWorx Scene file each pasted hotspot is a new hotspot, in a VRWorx object movie file each pasted hotspot is a clone of the hotspot that was copied. So even though each of the 360 icons in our VRWorx object movie file is covered with a hotspot, there are actually only 4 hotspots.
Finally, we embedded our Surveying Level object movie into a webpage and created a URL hotspot link to this webpage in our VRWorx Scene file.
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