Ive been looking at the HTML5 implementations both in Pano2VR and other providers and they all seem to be dependent on multiple files to work.
I am a web developer and all of our sites are CMS based (Our own CMS). Ideally we would be able to post a VR file to the server and have it play on all devises.
We are there now (final) for video: we can post a MP4 (h264) video, and have it play in HTML5 on mobile devices, Webkit and now IE9, and then fall back to a flash based player to play back on the others. The key here is that the content creator can make one single file and have it play back on multiple devises. (we wont get into the debate over h264/WebM/OOG)
Now for posting Panoramas its not so clean. We can make a single file SWF and thats great for a majority of uses. But if we want that VR to play back on an iPad or other mobile its not so good. We need to create a whole separate batch of files, and making a page that shows one or the other as needed is currently a LOT of work, and not viable if your in a CMS (as most sites are now)
So I had some thoughts on how a solution could be implemented, and wanted feedback and discussion to see if we could bring a reality to light.
First off this idea would support only simple Panoramas, no tours, hotspots, audio. (we have to start some place and I think there is lots of simple vrs like this out there)
Video based solutions such as http://videojs.com/ on a single media file that can be supported in HTML5 and Flash.
I would propose that the 3x2(video) formatted JPG could work as a source for both HTML5 player and SWF
For flash there could be a SWF loader where the source JPG is loaded in via flash vars.
For HTML5 it seems every one is using 6 square images and the new CSStransform3D properties.
all browsers that support the CSStransform3D properties also support Background-clip and background-origin
http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-background ... round-clip
Using those properties we should be able to create a HTML5 based player that can load a single image for the pano instead of 6 images.
Then we can then have a master JS library that can take the HTML source such as a simple img tag and convert it into a cross browser VR based on a class name.
<img src="/path/to/vrsource.jpg" class="vr" width="600px" height="200" />
Nice and easy to implement for the web developer!
Any how that's my thoughts. Would love to hear the communities feedback and comments!
Cheers.
