Panoramic Image Formats
Despite what Microsoft wants the world to think, there are many different combinations of
computers, operating systems and web browsers out there, and we want to make sure that our 360° Views can be viewed on all of them.
By offering multiple viewing options,
our panoramas should be easily viewable by any operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux and other Unix variations) using popular web browsers
like Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, Safari and Opera.
All of our 360° panoramas can be viewed with any of the following user-selectable viewing options.
In general, if a browser plug-in is required (and not installed) the browser will prompt the user to download the correct plug-in.
- Flash-based Viewer
-
The most ubiquitous viewer is an Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash based viewer. Flash is a very popular web content delivery method these days, and
estimates of the percentage of PCs with Flash capability is very high (>95%).
Viewing the panoramas with the Flash viewer requires a browser plug-in which can be downloaded
here.
- Apple QuickTime
-
To view the panoramas with QuickTime (QT) you must have the QT v5 or later plug-in installed.
If you're on a MAC, you have QT by default. If you have an iPod with iTunes installed, then you should also already
have QT on your machine. If you're not sure if the plug-in is installed, just try one of the panoramas.
If you need to install the plug-in, it'll let you know.
You can download the plug-in from here.
- Java-based Viewer
-
For a Java-based viewer, we use ImmerVision's Pure Player. This viewer requires a Java capable browser, making it
the viewer of choice on Linux and other Unix systems which might be incapable of viewing QT files.
Many browsers have Java support built-in, or the
software can be downloaded from Java.com.
You can test to see if your browser is Java-capable by visiting the
Java.com test page.
If you're interested in learning more about these formats, Wikipedia has pretty good articles on
QuickTime,
Java, and
Flash.