mkqtGUI

The mkqtGUI application was developed to be a simple tool for authoring QuickTime VR Object Movies. The software takes a sequence of images from different pan and tilt angles and compose them to a pseudo 3D object movie that can be interactively viewed with QuickTimes Movie Player and browser PlugIn.
The aim of this project is to present 3D objects, created by MeVisLab, interactively in web-pages. There are already some plug-ins and frameworks available to render polygonal and volume models directly in a web-browser, but these requires a conversion of the model data and the installation of uncommon browser plug-ins.
To avoid these requirements another solution is used. Instead of converting the model directly, a set of pre-rendered images from different viewpoints (pan/tilt) will be created. These images can be used to emulate a 3D behavior by showing the image corresponding to the users viewpoint.
An interface is needed to capture the users interaction and show the correct image. QuickTime already offers such a pseudo 3D file format based of pre-rendered images and as a common plug-in for different browsers, the decision was made to presenting MeVisLabs pre-rendered images by QuickTime.
Some proprietary and free authoring tools are available to convert images to the QuickTime VR container, but most of them are focused on panoramas instead of objects. Those which supports objects are over flooded with features and cannot be integrated into MeVisLab for automatic image conversion.
The task is to create a simple command line tool that can be used in MeVisLab for batch conversion of images into the QuickTime VR file format. The first part of this document gives an overview of the development process of mkqt, a tool for converting images to QuickTime in a simple batch style manner.
The second part is more user oriented and will guide through the creation and requirements of the images and how these images can be converted into a QuickTime VR file using the developed tool.