Reality Studio

The Reality Studio suite, from Live Picture, gives anyone with nothing more than a bit of point-and-click ability the opportunity to build immersive web sites with 360 degree panoramas and 3D objects.

I found the installation procedure annoying, and the Evaluator's Guide was not very helpful. Even though I selected to install the whole program, I still had to OK each separate program as it was installed, and after uninstalling it my browser still tries to open the read.me file instead of going to its usual default page. Hopefuly, this is only because I had an evaluation copy!

Eventually, I just put the CD in and crossed my fingers. What I ended up installing were 4 standalone programs and a Photoshop plug-in.

Weighing in at around 240 Mb (and well over the minimum 65MB hard disk requirement), Reality Studio is certainly no light-weight.

Reality Studio is made up of six components. I installed five of them, they were:

Live Picture Viewer
This is for viewing Reality Studio files and comes in two versions. Java and a plug-in. Object Modeller: This Live Picture tool generates 3D objects from a series of digitised images.

PhotoVista
PhotoVista creates 360-degree panoramas from a series of scanned images or digital photos. Having already given up with my Evaluator's Guide, I went outside with an early model digital camera. I was surprised how easily PhotoVista managed to stitch my snaps into a 3D panaroma. PhotoVista also generates the necessary HTML code, and opens up a test page in your browser.

Reality Studio
This is the major part of the package, where 2D and 3D elements, as well as FlashPix images, text, video and sound can be arranged. The interface is surprisingly simple and provides enough functionality and features to satisfy beginners as well as more advanced users. AVI, JPEG, WAV, animated GIFs and QuickTime are also supported.

The tutorial is brief, but gives a good idea of how Reality Studio works. The interface consists of an Asset Browser, which provides drag-and-drop access to your resources, the Project Manager which is an outline-style listing of all the assests added to a scene, and the Viewport which contains the current scene. Creating hotspots linking various scenes together means draging them from the Asset Manager to the image in the Viewport. A dialogue box allows the addition of various transition effects. A preview button shows how it will look in a browser.

FlashPix Photosop plug-in:
Flashpix is a multi-resolution graphics format developed for web use that allows viewers to zoom in and out of an image without loosing picture quality. Live Picture Image Server (standard edition) is also included in the bundle. As it only runs on Windows NT 4.0 or Sun Solaris 2.5.1, I never installed it. The Image Server ensures rapid delivery of high-resolution, zoomable FlashPix images. See it for yourself at http://www.livepicture.com/demos/

In spite of a few few quibbles with the installation, and the advertising brochures passed off as an Evaluator's Guide, Reality Studio should have a complete novice walking across water in their very own 3D panorama in no time at all.

http://www.livepicture.com

By Richard Price, Editor, EnergyME.com

For information on getting a product reviewed email richard@energyme.com