Skip to content

Tahiti PK14 by Greg Panayotou.
Home » Blogs » Aldo Hoeben's blog

Conference09 and... CuTy

Submitted by Aldo Hoeben on Fri, 2009-10-09 10:28.

It's been a bit silent, but that does not mean nothing has been going on ;-)

Yesterday, Matthias announced the website for panoramas and still images shot at the IAPP/IVRPA Alburquerque Balloon Fiesta. In the next few days, that site should be filling up with some nice panoramas shot by the IVRPA members attending the fiesta. It looks like a great event for VR panoramas.

Like the Photokina 08 subsite before it, the Conference 09 website is based on a newer version of Drupal. I've been talking about upgrading the main site for quite a long time now, but at least you have something tangible now. Among the new features we'll be unleashing on the new version of the main site is the Flash 10 based viewer which is already active on the conference09 (and photokina08) websites.

It's small, and it play QT VR files. It's CuTy!

CuTy is a small swf file (less than 10 kb) which does only one thing, but it does that rather ok: it displays (cubic, jpeg-encoded) QuicktimeVR panoramas. I made it because I've come to appreciate the QTVR mov format as a container; not because it is such a beautiful format (which it isnt), and definately not because of the Quicktime playback engine, but because there are so many tools that export Quicktime VR files. In a single container, you have the image data and all meta data. The format is monolithic, it is wrought in legacy and it will eventually be obsolete, but for now, in many cases, it is just convenient.

The ivrpa site is actually the second site that uses CuTy; the still-in-development viewer has also gone through its pases at the Sziget360 project, starting this year's edition.

PS: a word about SPi-V... No, I have not abandoned SPi-V. I still use it daily. There's just not that much more I can add to it with the platform that is Shockwave, especially now that Shockwave is really starting to show its age and lack of support by Adobe. In many ways its the anti-SPi-V; whereas SPi-V is extremely feature-rich, CuTY does only one thing. CuTy will not grow to be like SPi-V.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Re: Conference09 and... CuTy

Submitted by Aldo Hoeben on Tue, 2009-10-13 11:26.

I have just migrated the Photokina 2006 site from D47 to D5, as further "practice" for the big migration. As a result, the Photokina 2006 panoramas are now also displayed using CuTy by default.

The last remaining sites on the Drupal 4.7 codebase are the main site you are reading from now ("the big one"), and the conference 2007 site.

»