PTViewer 2.8

PTViewer is a java applet that can be used as a viewer for panoramic images. It has been developed by Helmut Dersch, the author of the well known Panorama Tools software package. Panorama Tools is not available any more from Mr. Dersch's site: you can click here to see a mirror of the original Panorama Tools site.

Helmut Dersch has written some really great pieces of software, and I would like to thank him for his hard work: PTViewer is now widely used in sites that show VR images, since it is a viewer with a lot of features and it works very well.

You can download a new version of PTViewer from this page. This version is based on PTViewer 2.5 and I have modified it to add new features. Here is a quick list of the main changes:

• A new Lanczos2 interpolator shows sharper images.
• Panning speed is now faster and smoother.
• The applet draws to the screen using hardware acceleration when using the Sun Java VM on Windows.
• The applet can now display panoramic images in a new custom format. It is possible to progressively load large images, showing first the part that the user is currently looking at.
• With the new custom file format it is possible to use encrypted images that will not work if used in another site.
• A new integrated toolbar can be used to show three buttons: zoom in, zoom out and show/hide hotspots. The zoom buttons work as long as you keep pressing them, the zoom in/zoom out button always stays in sync with the applet status.
• When using autopanning the applet can now rotate at a fixed speed, regardless of the CPU speed.

You can click here for a detailed description of the new features. A version history is also available.

You can download PTViewer version 2.8 clicking here. As in the V2.5 distribution, the zip file contains two different jar files. The smaller one contains only the basic panorama viewer without any extensions. The bigger one contains the panorama viewer with all extensions and it can be run as a standalone program too. Knows limitation: the integrated toolbar does not show up if the viewer is run as a standalone program.

The source code is available too: just click here.

I have prepared a sample page that shows a 600x450 pixel applet (the jpeg file size is 243Kb):

click here to see the sample image in PTViewer 2.8
as a comparison you can click here to see the same image with PTViewer 2.5

A note about version number

This viewer is based on version 2.5: as far as I know this is the last stable version released by Helmut Dersch before he closed his site years ago. There is a 2.6beta version too, but I preferred to start from a stable version. For some time a 2.7 version has been available from sourceforge (it was not developed by Helmut Dersch), but it seems not to be available any more.

I first released version 2.7L2: I decided to use 2.7 as the version number since the last official release was 2.6: this can cause confusion with the sourceforge version, so I added "L2" since the main new feature is the Lanczos2 interpolator.

Now I have added some new features and I have released version 2.8.

In early 2004 Helmut Dersch released a version 3.x of PTViewer: its main feature is the support for HDR images and is seems to be based on version 2.6.

Version 2.6 introduced some changes that you will not find in version 2.7L2: as far as I know the changes are the following:

• Direct support for partial panoramas (hfov < 360°).
• The ROI handling code was moved to a separate class so it was not available any more in the small applet. This changed the ROI syntax too.

Other software

FSPViewer is a free, very fast viewer for local, high resolution panoramas.

I hope that you'll enjoy using this applet, at least as much as I enjoyed writing it. Please feel free to contact me for bug reports, suggestions and impressions at the following e-mail address: fsenore@ica-net.it

Fulvio Senore