For my first blog entry, I thought that I might write a little on the beginnings of Redbug Technologies and our Mapwing virtual tour software.

You cannot understand this company without knowing a little bit about Nathan and myself. The two of us met at Dillsburg Elementary School sometime around 1992 when we were both in 5th grade. We actually worked on a project together where we were asked to design a futuristic city. We named our city H20, as it was to float on the oceans in the year 2050. Over the years, Nathan and I would go on to do many other school projects together including a marble shooting cannon, a stream table, and a mouse trap powered car. During this time we developed a mutual interest in computers, particularly Macs.

By high school, we had formed our first informal partnership called Andrew Productions and Graphics. APG, as it came to be known, allowed us to explore our interests in digital video, computers, and graphics while making some money on the side. This money usually went toward new equipment and software.

After high school, Nathan and I went in fairly different directions. I pursued a degree in film, photography, and the visual arts at Ithaca College, NY while Nathan went for mechanical engineering at York College, PA. But, we kept in touch and continued to work on APG related projects during the summers. By the time we graduated, we decided to try APG as a full-time business and leveraged our computer knowledge to provide technical support.

It was around November of 2003 that I first came to Nathan with the idea for what would become Mapwing. The idea had actually begun over a year earlier, when I was on an internship in New Hampshire. I had this thought that one could probably build virtual reality tours in a style similar to Myst and place them onto a DVD. I eventually found this to be impractical, but I filed the idea in the back of my mind.

Mapwing was originally conceived as a system to bring virtual reality tours to the masses. With the growing popularity of digital cameras, there was no reason why consumers could not create their own tours. Sometimes a photograph just isn’t enough to convey a given space or experience. Furthermore, sharing a virtual tour should be easy. Why would it need to be any more difficult than emailing an image or placing text on a web page? With these ideas in mind, we began laying the groundwork for Mapwing at the end of 2003. Neither Redbug nor Mapwing would exist, though, until late 2004. I’ll talk about that first year in a later blog entry.

Here at Redbug I tend to do most of the design and desktop publishing work. When I first learned about computer aided design, I was using Quark Xpress. It was not the slickest program ever created, but it ran well under the Classic versions of the Mac OS. In the late 90s and early 2000s, I was a Quark diehard. The program was fairly straightforward and intuitive. Used alongside Photoshop and Illustrator, I could design just about anything I needed. Furthermore, commercial printers had standardized on it, making Quark files the format of choice for going to press.

When Apple made the switch to OS X, most designers were left wondering what would happen to Quark Xpress. Quark was committed to bringing Xpress to the new OS, though their timeframe was less than desirable. Most designers, like myself, ended up running Quark Xpress 5 under Classic emulation for many years after making the switch to X. In 2003, Quark 6 finally added OS X support. Designers were expecting big things. However, the app ran like a dog, was full of bugs, and had few, if any, new features. It was a lot of money to shell out just for X compatibility.

So I took a look at Adobe’s InDesign.

I had first played with InDesign in the late 90s when it first released. Quark was better at that point. But, in the tech world, things can change very quickly. Today, in my opinion, InDesign is the premiere application for desktop publishing. Besides integrating well with the rest of Adobe’s apps, InDesign has excellent PDF support. This is especially important as more and more printers move toward a PDF workflow. Creating high-quality PDFs is becoming mission critical for designers. Most Redbug printed materials end up as a PDF at one point or another. The Mapwing user’s guides were all created with InDesign and take advantage of the app’s PDF links and compression options. In general, I would recommend Adobe’s InDesign over Quark Xpress to those in the design or desktop publishing field.

Mapwing is virtual tour software. However, there seems to be a lot of debate over what exactly is a virtual tour. The term virtual tour is most closely linked with real estate and the selling of properties. Most realtors provide some type of virtual tour for their high-end properties. Tours are usually built around panoramas, galleries of pictures, or short movies. Sometimes, if you are a lucky, you will find one with a floor plan and a voice over. In my opinion, none of these are not true virtual tours.

So what makes a true virtual tour? Well, first let us consider the process of taking a real tour. If I were to visit Monticello, I would be guided through the building and the grounds. On a real tour, I move through space, visiting rooms and noting items of interest. I am also provided with specific information about what I am experiencing. A tour is an active process build around information, movement, and three dimensional space.

By comparison, most so called virtual tours are a passive, two dimensional experience. Simply put, they are used as a gimmick to attract attention to specific places or web sites and have little value for the end user. Shouldn’t a virtual tour provide a similar experience and information as real onsite tour?

One of the best types of virtual tour experiences can be seen in first person shooter computer games. By and large, these are entirely 3D worlds that enable a user to walk around and interact in an immersive world. Unfortunately, creating this type of tour is time consuming, resource intensive, and costly. In other words, it wouldn’t work for someone like a realtor who needs to create several virtual tours a month and have decent profit margins.

Mapwing solves the problems of virtual tour creation by using everyday digital photographs. And, by using points and connections, it enables immersive tours that allow users to walkthrough a given location. Mapwing tours are true virtual tours, encouraging an active, movement-based, first person experience.

For more information, try the Wikipedia definition of Virtual Tour.

Technology builds on technology. When we began designing Mapwing, we needed a graphics system powerful enough to display our virtual reality style. At the same time, we needed something that was flexible enough to reach a mass market. Thankfully, there are many good graphics technologies available to meet a wide variety of needs. Our needs for Mapwing looked something like this:

1. Display pictures and graphics (JPEG, TIFF, etc)
2. Provide realtime, smooth animation
3. Exist on multiple platforms (Mac, Windows, web)

Initially, we settled on using QuickTime and OpenGL. QuickTime, while not hugely popular in the Windows world, is one of the very best systems for loading, converting, manipulating, and displaying multimedia. QuickTime libraries exist for both Macintosh and Windows. QuickTime programming isn’t so bad on the Mac, as I managed (in early 2004) to implement some of the initial Creator functionality myself. That said, QuickTime is no walk in the park, especially for the Windows environment. Mark and Curtis have done an amazing job wrangling it into Mapwing Viewer and Mapwing Creator Pro. In the Mapwing system, QuickTime serves to load and manipulate image data for display to screen.

Display is then handled by OpenGL. OpenGL is another great technology. Normally, we think of it in terms of 3D games and CAD applications, but OpenGL can also work well in a 2D world. The nice thing about OpenGL is that it harnesses the power of hardware graphics accelerators (graphics cards or chips) found in most computers today. OpenGL is powerful, enabling the drawing of colored and textured objects as well as the realtime animation of these. On top of this, OpenGL is cross-platform, even more so than QuickTime. This helps a great deal by allowing one programmer to design core graphics functionality for both Windows and Macintosh versions of our software. As one might expect, Curtis and Mark share a good bit of OpenGL and QuickTime code.

As we beta tested Mapwing Viewer and Mapwing Creator Pro this past spring, we received a lot of feedback. In particular, a group of users suggested that we might have better web support. At that time, Mapwing tours could only be embedded as hyperlinks within web sites, forcing viewers to download Mapwing Viewer onto their computer before exploring the tour. This changed with the advent of Mapwing Flash Viewer.

Mapwing Flash Viewer emulates the Mapwing graphical style found in the Viewer and Creator. However, it uses a completely different graphics system, Flash. Macromedia’s Flash platform has been around for a while. Most web surfers have run into it at one time or another as part of a web site, banner ad, online game, or animation. Flash was not initially designed to create web applications like Mapwing Flash Viewer. Because of this, it is complex, complicated, and often very confusing. As we like to say, you have to “beat it” into doing what you want! Head banging and hair pulling aside, Flash has worked out well for us. It has the ability to display and animate graphics and pictures. It is also cross-platform. Unfortunately, Flash doesn’t have the best binary data loading, so we use PHP to help integrate it with the standard Mapwing streaming files.

So which graphics system is better? Well, the performance of QuickTime and OpenGL is truly something to behold, especially when compared to Flash. Both technologies are compiled for their respective platforms and do not run through a virtual machine. This means smooth, full screen graphics at the cost of larger downloads and installs. These days, the installer for QuickTime on Windows is about 30 megabytes. That’s nothing to sneeze at even on broadband! Thankfully, QuickTime is pre installed as part of the Mac OS. OpenGL is included on Windows and Macs too. Even on most 5 year old hardware, Mapwing Viewer runs nicely at full screen. For presenting or exploring Mapwing files locally, Mapwing Viewer really is the way to go.

Mapwing Flash Viewer could display tours at full screen resolutions too. However, the performance would be less than adequate. With Flash, Mapwing gains portability and the ability to be blended with web content. Unfortunately, this comes at the cost of losing performance and flexibility. For content creators, graphics often boil down to a question of quality vs. accessibility. In other words, the best looking solutions are usually only viewable by a fraction of the potential audience.

I frequent several VR discussion boards including the PanoTools yahoo group. In circles like these, members often argue about the best way to display their VR panoramas. With regard to panoramas (which I do not consider to be virtual tours in and of themselves), there are three main technologies used for exhibition: QuickTimeVR, Java, and Flash.

Pano aficionados place QuickTime on a pedestal and for good measure. QuickTimeVR panoramas are often quite beautiful and displayed at high resolutions. They also tend to be larger downloads and require you to have QuickTime installed, which many Windows users do not.

Then there is Java. Java based viewers are really the standard in the pano world. They come in many different shapes, sizes, and flavors. One thing they have in common is that they require you to have Java installed, and they are generally sluggish with low quality images. Without question, Java based panoramas billed as virtual tours are one the big reasons users loath VR.

Finally, there is Flash. Panoramas displayed in Flash lack dimension, as up until Flash 8 one could not properly warp a 360º around the viewer. Personally, I have trouble looking at this type of flat panorama. However, the real advantage to Flash technologies are their cross-platform reach and decent performance.

Now, for those versed in web graphics there is a lot of talk today about AJAX, which basically amounts to blending Javascript, XML, and DHTML into web pages. The end goal is to build web applications like Google Maps. Macromedia (which is now Adobe) is looking to accomplish similar ends with Flash. Which do I prefer? Well, Flash to be honest. While I appreciate the AJAX methodology for its focus on standards, I think the graphics performance in Flash is superior to DHTML and Javascript. That said, I suspect that this gap will close over time, especially as computers become faster. There is also still the question of Java technologies and Microsoft. It’s a known fact that Microsoft has been hostile toward Java in the past, and I’ll be curious to see if the propagation of AJAX has any future effect upon that.

Choosing a graphics system for a software application is no small task, let alone actually programming it. We made some good decisions early on with Mapwing by deciding upon QuickTime and OpenGL, two powerful, cross-platform technologies. Later we brought Flash into the mix. While not as powerful, Flash has a level of flexibility not found in other solutions. Thankfully, good software design enables us to incorporate the latest graphics systems into Mapwing should the need ever arise. Does this mean we might one day see a DirectX or AJAX based Viewer? Only time will tell