Sam McMillan
360-degrees of reality! It's a whole lot more than some people have.
Apple wanted their products to spin. Hewlett-Packard wanted customers to examine their new printers in a virtual showroom. Virtual reality fly-throughs may still be a lab-bench fantasy, but even those of us without the goggles and head-mounted video displays can still get 360-degrees of virtual reality on the Web. Photographer John Greenleigh, of Flipside Studios, walks us through the process of making a QuickTime VR movie.
Concept 1
Make 'em Spin
John Greenleigh already had more than twelve years of experience photographing Apple products. In 1996 he was asked by one of Apple's marketing agencies to "make the products turn."
"I didn't know what they were talking about," he remembers.
His research into 3-D photography led him to the Web and, ironically enough, back to Apple, which had just released a product called QuickTime VR. Apple's engineers were about the only ones using the technology. "The engineers had the technology down, but they didn't understand lighting or photography," Greenleigh says. "I brought the craft to the technology."
Concept 2
Making the Investment in Digital
Eventually Greenleigh had to make a decision. "Do I invest my time and money in digital photography? I finally realized digital photography was going to happen, and here was Apple helping me get paid to learn it."
Greenleigh has invested over $200,000 in Flipside Studios in the last six years.
His first project was pretty low-tech. "I shot a PowerPC on a Lazy Susan. I took 36 pictures manually and stitched them together." Today Flipside Studios is totally automated, thanks to the work of engineer Lewis Knapp and his company Corybant West. Knapp designed the computer-controlled, motor-driven camera rigs and the software interface that Greenleigh uses.
Concept 3
HP Wants a Virtual Showroom
At the time that designer Brooks Cole knocked on the door of Flipside Studios, Hewlett Packard's LaserJet printer group was contributing $12 billion to its bottom-line. HP had hired Cole, who runs Holocosmos Design, to design a virtual showroom and product configurator that would enable an online customer to walk around its products, "kick the tires" in 360 degrees and virtually customize a printer with accessories.
Cole turned to Greenleigh to make virtual reality a reality.
Design 1
Studio Design: Design for Precision
The software Greenleigh uses is designed for precise feedback. "I always know exactly what frame I'm on and what position the turntable was in, and I can jump back to any frame and any position I need."
His MegaVision camera is mounted on a 12-foot-high, motion-controlled camera boom. At the foot of it sits a gray box of electronics. This processing unit interfaces with a step motor on the boom, to deliver precision control. All are run off a Mac II SI using HyperCard as a controller.
Design 2
Studio Design: Design for Lighting
Greenleigh shoots products on a four-foot diameter plywood custom turntable driven by a computer-controlled motor. The booms and turntable allow him to position his lights anywhere in the studio without creating shadows. "Lighting is what it's all about," Greenleigh says. "It separates the pros from the technologists."
Greenleigh uses large light sources beamed through six-foot by six-foot diffused vellum scrim. "Not only do you have to eliminate shadows," he says but every angle and every position has to be lighted so the forms of the object—the front plane, the side plane and the top plane are all defined and separate."
Design 3
Web Design: For Interaction and Navigation
There's more to life than making objects spin and turn. In the case of the HP 8500 Color LaserJet printers, Cole, Greenleigh and the Shockwave programmers worked to design a site that put the controls in the customers' hands. Greenleigh calls these interactive VR movies "Enhanced VRs," because they include more graphics, more animated parts, fly-ins and user controls.
Slider bars enable visitors to quickly see the HP product that can meet their needs, using parameters like cost, quality and color vs. black-and-white. The interactive solution finder lets prospective customers choose a base printer, then configure it by clicking on a number of options.
Design 4
Web Design: For Interaction and Navigation
Greenleigh created a series of VR movies of the base printers then painstakingly photographed the accessories flying in-and-out of the printer. Each HP product and its accessories took about a-day-and-a-half to shoot. Animations were then programmed in Shockwave, which enabled greater interaction and user control. On the Web the printer revolves while, depending on the options the user selects, various components such as an eight-bin mailbox/paper sorter, a hard drive and a print server card fly into the appropriate slots.
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