this site is outdated, I may resurect it in html5 sometime in 202x

things you might care to know about…

→ version française

1. knowables about myself and this web thing…

I’m mickael therer, a pano-photographer living somewhere in Belgium and 360 days is my playground, a place meant to hold all the QTVR I exercise with. Half blog, half vr-pictures gallery, 360 days was meant to showcase my practice of vr shooting in the hope of extending the visibility of qtvr outside the vr-artists’ communities.

This site is wrapped in an attempt at more serious web design using textpattern and valid css and xhtml when possible. So no flashy interface here, I’ve tried to keep the pages accessible, but still the heavy bandwidth usage and non-valid markup of QTVR remain.

Occasionally I will add articles in the blog noise section, usually related to my vr practice. But the main reason for this site is the 360 section. I hope you will find it interesting and that you will comment the work and kick me forward for more…

Before you move on : if you don’t see the strange spinning tomato in the right column then you need to grab your Quicktime plug in before exploring this site. A Quicktime version 6 is needed on some pages with sound.

2. a quick user guide …

When you will hit the VR pages (and I sure hope you do) you’ll need a slick adsl line for the fullscreen mode, but if you’re on dial-up, I’ve worked it so as to provide you with a smaller file, not as fun or immersible experience, but I once was on dial-up too so I care that you don’t have to wait 360 seconds until you can start seeing something.

The QTVRs on this site are provided in different sizes to accommodate for your bandwidth (and mine). Files range from 300k up to 750k labeled * and from 1 to 2 megabytes labeled *[FULLSCREEN]. All the links to QTVRs open in a new window the fullscreens hopefully should offer a truly immersive experience.
Click and drag with your mouse to move around the panorama, use the shift and ctrl keys to zoom in or out.

Use this grayscale step wedge below to calibrate your monitor. For best contrast, you shoud see as many as 21 differents steps from white to black.
contrast calibration
As the image loads, you will usually see a dark patterned cube seen from the inside, the patterned grid will fill with the full image in a few seconds depending on the QTVR size and your connection. Sometimes the grid will not display and a QuickTime icon will show up instead, this is normal check the status bar to monitor your download speed.

3. how it’s done …

My current combo for imaging these spherical pictures is a Nikon D100 coupled with a Nikkor 10.5 mm or a Nikkor 12-24 mm DX lenses, this is all mounted onto a monopod or tripod, depending on stability needed, with a spin device I bought from “Kaidan”:http://www.kaidan.com in the last century manfrotto.
This is all stitched on a mac using PTMac and it usually takes 6+2 shots and a couple of hours, sometimes much more depending on the action, to produce a fullscreen panorama.

Hope you enjoy it all, and I can’t wait to read what you have to say.

mickael
12 July 2004


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