Phillips even suggested that if iPIX movies had been around at the time of President John F. He also noted that an iPIX camera could serve as an all-seeing security camera. He said he could easily imagine iPIX cameras being strapped to race cars or athletes so viewers could get a first-person point of view. Phillips said the applications of what the company calls 360-by-360-degree video were almost endless. While the film clip was shot with a single camera using a small new iPIX lens and camera, the scores of possible angles from which to view the scene gave viewers the impression that the waterfall had been photographed with dozens of cameras. By moving a computer mouse, the viewpoint of the scene smoothly shifted within the movie and kept shifting as long as the mouse was moving. Last week the company announced its first commercial applications of iPIX movies, in a deal with Discovery Online and the Hawaiian Visitor and Convention Bureau to produce interactive movies of the Hawaiian islands.Ī preview of an iPIX movie showed a lush scene of a Hawaiian waterfall shot from a helicopter high above. The iPIX technology can be used in digital video as well as in traditional movie cameras. It is an application that transports you into spaces where otherwise you could not go.'' ''We've shown its incredible capabilities,'' said James Phillips, iPIX's chairman and chief executive, speaking of his company's new video technology. Called iPIX Movies, the technology permits users to tilt and pan across the image through 360 degrees, looking left and right, up and down without interrupting the flow of various moving images. Pictures taken with a fisheye lens and processed with software that stitched together two 180-degree shots of a single scene or object let viewers rotate a 360-degree panorama by simply moving their mouse around the picture.Īt last week's Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, Calif., iPIX unveiled its immersive application for moving images to a range of potential partners. The technology that makes immersive video possible is being advanced primarily by two companies, the Internet Pictures Corporation, or iPIX, based in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Palo Alto, Calif., and the Be Here Corporation, based in Cupertino, Calif.įor years, computer users have been able to view still pictures that took advantage of immersive technology online and on CD-ROM's and DVD discs. More examples may soon show up in baseball dugouts and concert seats. This immersive, interactive video has already been used by and to stream 360-degree videos of behind-the-scene action at the Super Bowl in January. And for the first time, video on the Internet can do something television video cannot: permit viewers to take a virtual step into moving pictures and change their perspective on what they see as easily as if they were turning their heads. Viewers have long been forced to download many programs with many levels to squint into little windows on computer monitors to see smudgy, sputtering shadows.īut with steady improvements in streaming technologies, online video is beginning to approach - at best - the outer edges of television-quality video. WATCHING video images on the Internet is one of those computer tasks with more Next steps than a mambo.
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