I’ve just heard that Google has bought Quiksee for 10 millions $. I was curious about Quiksee virtual tour technology as I’ve written myself something that seem equivalent 5 years ago. But their website doesn’t explain anything, neither their “nice” demo clip.
Like Quiksee, my virtual tour system is composed of panoramic pictures linked by videos. The first version of my virtual tour was created in 2005 (2 years before Google Street View launch).
During my internship in the beautiful city of the Puy-en-velay I’ve taken around 1800 pictures to create a virtual tour. This virtual tour is composed of 18 panoramic pictures and 44 videos links. I’ve first created a full featured version using Flash for video playback (Yajev) and then I’ve improved this version with a full HTML5 version (Html5 Virtual Tour).
Yajev
Ok, I’m not gifted to find a product name (Yajev -> Yaj3v (l33t) -> yajvvv -> yet another virtual visit viewer). My first demo of Yajev was created in 2005 and was showing a small French village (5000 pictures, 51 videos and 20 panoramic pictures), but it’s not visible anymore.
->Live demo<-
Best viewed with IE9 (there is a bug with the Flash player with the other browser)
Features:
- 360° panoramic player
- Flash video player
- Map
- Hotspot links and tips displayed over panoramic picture
- Dijkstra shortest path finder and player
- Plugin system: compass, debug, 3d sound, lytebox, debug
- XML based virtual tour configuration
Html5 VirtualTour
This version is 2 years old now. Unfortunately the videos were encoded with Theora, so this demo can’t run on IE9. So this demo is best viewed with Google Chrome and Firefox.
->Live demo<-
Best viewed with Google Chrome
Features:
- 360° panoramic player with smooth animation
- Html5 video player
- Canvas map
- Hotspot links and tips displayed over panoramic picture
- XML based virtual tour configuration
Download
There is no support for this virtual tour ! The javascript files are not obfuscated: you are free to do what you want with it. I’ve created this to improve my javascript skills, but I’m much more interested by computer vision now, so I’m sorry but I can’t provide any support for Yajev nor Html5 Virtual Tour.
Keep doing your fine work, maybe Google will buy you out too. They could certainly use a competing product to Photosynth.
We need something like this! Hello friend. Just looking around because you nailed it. There is no useful info on Quiksee website. We just launched a site that needs virtual tours and this would be a perfect match. Can you help?
Hello,
I’ve been following Quiksee but I’m disappointed there’s no real software to use. My business is launching a cafe and we were planning to use Quiksee to setup our virtual tour. Is your software available for use? I’d love to try it and see how it works for us.
Thanks!
@all: this prototype (yajev) was made 5 years ago ! I’ve updated this prototype with all Html5 goodness (Html5VirtualTour) just for fun. But I have no plan for those virtual tour, I’m now interested in more complex work (computer vision). Nevertheless those prototypes are big (around 3500 line of js code each) and it would be hard for anyone to try to use it. The bad news is that I have renounced to finish the editor needed to generate the xml files used by my virtual tour. Furthermore those virtual tour didn’t have been tested with IE6 so it’s not wide-audience ready… (that’s the main drawback of using Html5 JS Vs Flash).
@matt, if you need virtual tours, my company makes them, see everyscape.com
We have a fully operational software + production capacity setup and ready. Check http://www.vidiwalk.com
Regards, Chris PROOT CEO VidiWalk inc.