Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

SPi-V
Chapter 24 ■ Panorama Software: Photo Stitching and Virtual Tours 273
Vendor: fieldOfView
Purpose: Hardware-accelerated panoramic viewing engine, built on Shockwave 3D
Description
SPi-V (pronounced “spiffy,” and short for Shockwave panorama viewer) is a panoramic
viewing engine that requires an up-to-date video card with plenty of RAM and the
Adobe Shockwave plug-in. Its purpose is to provide the smoothest and best VR viewing
experience, but it does more than that. The SPi-V viewer is configured through
XML files so that it can display special effects in addition to the normal panning and
zooming of a panoramic image.
For example, SPi-V can show animated time-lapse photography combined with
panoramic viewing: most of the image remains static, but a figure in it can move. Even
more impressive is its implementation of Adaptive Dynamic Range (ADR), a technology
that adapts the tonal levels according to the part of the image currently displayed.
(Pan to an open window and the displayed image stops itself down automatically.) In
another technique, Focal Blur, panning the image makes the edges go out of focus but
sharpens the central field of view, giving a strangely realistic simulation of how we actually
see the world around us. These and other effects make SPi-V the most capable of
all VR viewers currently available.
Comments
Available for licensing to panoramic photographers and Website developers, SPi-V was
made originally for the vendor’s own customers. The images it displays are among the
most innovative of all those on the Web, but to appreciate them you need to view them
online rather than in print. SPi-V for Flickr is a useful tool for placing the images onto
the Flickr photo-sharing site. At the time of writing SPi-V is still in development, but
promises to be a revolutionary means of viewing photographs on a computer.
Version: SPi-V 1.4.6 (2008)
OS: Windows 98 and up; Mac OS 9.x and OS X
RAM: Hardware-accelerated 3D card with 32MB RAM
Supported file formats: XML plus standard graphics formats
Price level: With fieldOfView branding free, without branding approx. $50
Address: Aldo Hoeben/fieldOfView, Lange Nieuwstraat 23 b1, 3111 AC Schiedam,
The Netherlands
www.fieldofview.com