Fullscreen Flash Panoramas Now Possible

Earlier this week Thomas Rauscher (http://www.pano2qtvr.com/) released a beta version of his pano2qtvr converter that has the ability to convert a fullscreen QuickTime panorama or an equirectangular image to a fullscreen Flash image. What this means is that it’s finally possible to create fullscreen Flash Panoramas of reasonable quality. Here’s my living room as a fullscreen Flash spherical panorama.

This is a significant development because up until now you could only use QuickTime, Java or Shockwave to display fullscreen panoramas and not all users that you want to view your panorama have one of these technologies installed. As I’ve pointed out before here are Adobe stats on how many people have each viewing technology installed. If you want someone to look at a virtual tour they’d better have the particular technology you use to display images loaded on their machine. Very, very few users are going to bother to do an 11 megabyte download and install of QuickTime just to look at your image! According to the stats above you have the best chance of having your images seen if you use Flash- 97.3% of users will be able to see your work.

You’ve been able to use Flash for small panoramas for several years but my theory is that displaying small panoramas is not worth the bother. Large images have a bigger impact and give the effect you want. After all this is the age of 52″ plasma TVs. Once you’ve seen a movie on a 52″ High definition TV is hard to go back to an ordinary 27″ TV. The same thing is going on with computer images… you have to use big images to grab peoples attention.

So the bottom line is whether you are a real estate photographer or an agent you should be looking for oppurtunities to use large images that everyone can see and the best way to do that on the web is with Flash.