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    Kinoma Delivers a Virtual Reality UpdatePosted By: Ryan on Tuesday, February 15, 2005 2:24:14 PM
Kinoma has released an update to its popular Kinoma Player 3 EX, bringing the magic of immersive interactive images to Palm OS. For the first time, owners of Palm Powered smartphones and mobile devices can interactively view 360 degree Quicktime VR images with unprecedented quality, and simplicity using Kinoma Player 3 EX.
Kinoma Player 3 EX introduced support for many industry standards including MPEG-4 and H.263 video, AAC audio, and JPEG photographs. Kinoma Player 3 EX version 3.1 extends support for industry standard formats by adding direct viewing of QuickTime VR files containing cubic panoramas(1), the defacto industry standard for immersive imaging. Users can simply copy existing many of their existing QuickTime VR cubic panoramas to a memory card to conveniently view them anywhere using Kinoma Player 3 EX. Cubic panoramas optimized for viewing on mobile devices are no bigger than a single high resolution JPEG image, allowing over one thousand interactive images to be stored on a single memory card.(2) Kinoma Player 3 EX provides incredibly smooth panning and zooming of cubic panoramas. Users can directly interact with the panorama, panning around the image by dragging the stylus. These features are seamlessly integrated into Kinoma Player 3 EX.
Because available memory and screen size varies widely between different models of Palm Powered handhelds, Kinoma Player 3 EX incorporates dynamic resolution reduction technology, which automatically adjusts the resolution of the cubic panoramic images, as they are loaded. This advanced technology virtually assures that a single panoramic VR file can be viewed on any Palm Powered handheld. On the Kinoma web site, a new VR gallery contains sample floor to ceiling, 360 degree images allowing users to immediately experience the magic of handheld immersive imagery. The gallery includes a look inside Burt Rutan's Boomerang aircraft courtesy of the Smithsonian's Air & Space Magazine, San Francisco's historic Herbst Theater, a stunning synthetic landscape by David Palermo of WorldVR.com and the organ loft at Stanford's Memorial Church. "Customers choose Palm OS because it provides access to the most powerful and wide ranging suite of applications of any mobile platform. The addition of cubic panoramic images to Kinoma Player 3 EX's MPEG-4, AAC and JPEG brings one more powerful and distinctive capability to users of Palm Powered smartphones and mobile devices," said Larry Berkin, PalmSource director developer marketing. "We are pleased to see Kinoma extending the boundaries of digital media on mobile devices and look forward to seeing how users take advantage of this immersive imaging feature." Kinoma Player 3 EX version 3.1 also incorporates enhanced support for the 5-way navigation control on palmOnefs popular Treo smartphone and Tungsten T5, making it even easier to use Kinoma Player 3 EX on these devices. Kinoma Producer 3 has also been updated to include a command line encoder on Windows, to support automated encoding of content.
Pricing & Availability A free trial edition of Kinoma Producer 3 is available for download with registration. The full version of Kinoma Producer 3 can be purchased through the Kinoma Web site for $29.99. Kinoma Producer 3 requires Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP or Mac OS X. Kinoma Player 3 EX version 3.1 is available in English, German and Japanese. (1) QuickTime VR cubic panoramas must use JPEG image compression and an uncompressed movie resource. Interactive features are not supported. Only the first node of a multimode panorama is displayed. For more detailed information on supported features and optimizing cubic panoramas for mobile devices, see Kinoma Tech Note 03 "Cubic Panoramas with Kinoma Player 3 EX" (2) A typical cubic VR panorama at an optimal resolution for viewing on mobile devices is approximately 500 KB. A 1 GB memory card can store to 2000 cubic panoramas at this size.
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Article Comments
5 total comments The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. PIC is not responsible for them in any way. login or register for free in order to post comments.  RE: I don't want to use propritory crap.
When I have Kinoma 3 encode movies for me, it spits them out as MP4s. Hardly proprietary. VR Quicktimes are great and all, but what about MP3s? RE: I don't want to use propritory crap.
Pretty much every piece of video compression software uses proprietary technology. Unfortunately there are BS software patents on most everything these days. I think DivX (it's DivX not DIVX) is proprietary, they just happen to have an open source player for it.
I don't think the free player you linked to does anything with jpegs. 
 Good ideaMediaBaron @ 2/16/2005 1:45:09 PM #
The use of QuickTime VR is a good idea. Good for places that could use Palm units for a self-guided tour. The QuickTime VR image could have labels marked on the image so the viewer can have a legend as to what they're viewing in real life. But without clickable links to extract more information that might be a downside.
Curiousity Poll...ackmondual @ 2/16/2005 7:16:24 PM #
How many people actually use QuickTime and/or RealPlayer (I know Kinoma doesn't support RealPlayer videos, but i added it in for the heck of ti). If so how much?
[signature0]the secret to enjoying your job is to have a hobby that's even worse[/signature0] [signature1]My PDAs: Visor --> Visor Neo (blue) --> Zire 71 --> Tungsten T3[/signature1]
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"Mobile access to panoramic images is a powerful tool for realtors, educators, architects, tourism and emergency responders, letting people explore locations they are unable to visit," said Richard Doherty, Research Director for The Envisioneering Group. "By empowering support for existing QuickTime VR cubic panoramas on Palm Powered handhelds, Kinoma enables people to conveniently take these images anywhere, and to easily share them with customers, clients and friends."
The world will end in 2006. Just as it was predicted in the bible along with the release of Microsoft Longhorn.... :p