360VR Flash Player Implementations Compared to QuickTime

Several people have asked about which of the 3 major Flash player implementations are the “best”. Since it’s been my experience that the image displayed and the size of the equirectangular image used plays a big part in how the image looks I thought it would be instructive to do a comparison of the different Flash players all using the very same image as input.

For the comparison is used a 360VR image above of my grandson Morgan standing beside the Spruce Goose, SR71 and Atlas missile at the Evergreen Aviation Museum. Since I originally prepared the image for QuickTime I decided to include the QuickTime image. This image that was used as input to all of the players below is a 3600×1800 JPG file that is 1.15 MB. Here’s how it looks in each of the players:

QuickTime from: Apple
Pano2VR from: Garden Gnome Software
Immervision from: Immervision
FPP (Denis Chumakov) from: Flashpanoramas.com

By looking at the same image in all 4 players you can get a feeling for any differences in the load time, rendering or smoothness of these players. I have a hard time seeing any differences between the 4 different players. I’ll let you be the judge of the quality of the different players.

Another factor, which I haven’t compared is the ease of use of each of these players. My general assessment is that Immervision is probably the most involved and Pano2VR is probably the easiest. But there are other strong and weak points of each of the Flash players. I’ll have to leave that for another post.