When you create a QuickTime VR movie you provide your audience with a unique way to explore an environment.  This environment could be your brick and mortar store, a special event location, or even a television studio.  While your user may be able to navigate around the area, what really makes a QuickTime VR movie shine is the ability to create interactivity via hotspots.

When you add hotspots in your QuickTime VR movie, you give the end user a way to navigate through multiple environments.  For example, if you were a real estate agent, you could create a QuickTime VR movie of the living room of a house you are selling.  You could also create one for the kitchen of that same house.  While the end user may not mind clicking on a map of the house to view the individual clips, it would be better if the potential buyer could view the living room, and then click on the door to the kitchen to go to that movie.  This interactivity creates a more meaningful experience for the end user, and in the case of selling a home, gives the buyer a better sense of how the home is laid out.  For the brick and mortar company, a QuickTime VR of the store, gives the buyer a chance to see your wares.  By adding hotspots, the visitor can click on an item for sale which would cause a window to popup detailing the item.

For those of you who have created QuickTime VRs you’re probably using your own program to create that interactivity.  In this quick exercise, I’ll demonstrate how to create interactivity in your QuickTime VRs by using the new hotspot creation tool in REALVIZ’s Stitcher 4.0.

As I’ve already pointed out in my review of Stitcher, it is a great product to stitch together still images to create a QuickTime VR. This feature has been around in previous versions, but it is only in the latest release that interactivity in QuickTime VRs can be built directly from the stitching application.

Step 1:  Begin by taking pictures of your environment.  Be careful that you are providing adequate overlap on your shots to make sure the images will stitch with least difficulty.  For this exercise, I decided to create a QTVR of the university television station where I teach.

Step 2:  Stitch your images together in Stitcher 4.0.  When you have made a complete 360, close the panorama.  This is a must do step when creating a QuickTime VR.  If you need to, use the new Stencil Tool to aid in the removal of ghost images.

Step 3.  When you are satisfied with your environment, switch to the hotspot mode by going to Tools>Hotspots.

Step 4:  To create a hotspot in your QuickTime VR you will need to create a polygon region using the tool.  Double click near the area you want to create the hotspot to drop the first point.  Move to a different location around your hotspot and click once to drop another point.  Continue around the hotspot area until your have defined the region.  To close the polygon, double click with your mouse.  In this example, I have defined the region of the blackboard that will link to a schedule of when the shows shot in studio will be in production.