In my mind, panorama viewers — just the viewer part — were one of the biggest hurdles in making panoramas more prevalent on the web (pls read Thoughts About Panoramic Photography (part 2) ).  Even if you have an eat-your-heart-out-Ansel-Adams panorama shot, if you couldn’t share it on the internet then you’re screwed.  And unfortunately, people are not trusting of plug-ins or standalones – it had to just work (I will talk about that in a bit).  If you had to download anything, then the chances of someone seeing your content are slim.

I believe one of the first, if not the first, commercial/consumer panorama viewer was QuickTime VR by Shencheng Eric Chen.  He published a paper in 1995 in SIGGRAPH describing QTVR. Another notable is Helmut Dersch, the creator of Panorama Tools in 1998.  Focusing on just the viewer part, he had a PTViewer which was java based.

Unfortunately, neither QuickTime VR nor Java had (and even the present tense “has”) the penetration to enable users to view the panoramas.  (If 1 in 3 or 4 cannot view your content on the web, it looks broken.)  Check out Rich Internet Application Statistics page — got some pretty wonderful numbers there.

Now let’s talk about Flash and how it made a difference.  I will go as far as how it has changed the (panorama) world.

I remember the early days of Flash when it was mainly meant to be a vector animation and viewing tool. And slowly, but surely, version after version, it started to morph itself into a much more versatile language for photos and videos. (Wikipedia rocks — found the history of Flash releases.)  Once Flash Player version 8 came out in late 2005 with an ability to affine warp photo textures, that got a few smart folks working on Flash-based panorama viewers.  I found one of the first viewers here.  (If you can find more, PLS comment!)  Just so that I am clear, by panorama viewer, I mean correct perspective warping, not those cheesy viewers where straight lines are all sinusoidal and sh!t.

First Flash Panorama Viewer (?)

So, what did this mean?  With Flash Player penetration of ~95%, that meant most people could view the panoramas and hence brought the content/media to the realm of “mainstream!”

Believe it or not, this has changed our world.  Thank you MacroMedia for that small innovation that made a difference.