About This Site
The Virtual Gallery is a series of computer-generated panoramic images, each depicting a room in a fantastic image gallery. Visitors can move from room to room, look around and view the images on display.
This is a very, very old project of mine, and I still can't believe it has finally gone live, but if you are reading this it must have... Wow, I'm so excited, I did it (again)!
Why?
A long time ago, in maybe 1996 or so, when I was still young and naïve, I got my hands on a copy of Adobe Photoshop. I started playing around with the program, and quickly got to like it. Time went by, and soon I had a pile of pictures: distorted photos, generated patterns, filtered and re-filtered noise, and much more.
Around the same time, a friend of mine introduced me to POV-Ray. With my affinity for computer-generated graphics and geometrical problems this, too, touched a nerve. At the time I still was a student and had a lot of time to kill, a thing for which POV-Ray is the perfect tool. Only, I had nowhere to show the results of these activities, so they just kept bit-rotting along somewhere on my hard disks, getting lost now and then during the occasional disk crash.
Then I learned about QuickTime VR, which at the time was a brand new, bleeding-edge technology (did I mention I have been working on this for some time now?). Immediately I had an idea: I would build a gallery for my Photoshop images, using POV-Ray and QuickTime VR. That's got to be easy, right? Just whip together some rooms in POV-Ray, place the pics in there, render the whole thing and mash it into a VR movie. No problem!
And thus the Virtual Gallery Project was born.
How?
As it turns out, I slightly underestimated the scale of the project.
As I said above, the original plan was to implement it as a series of QuickTime VR movies. So I started out designing some rooms, and implementing a complex system in POV-Ray's Scene Description Language to lay them out in a hexagonal grid and automatically render the six sides of the sky cube which make up each room.
I also realised that there were no readily available and sufficiently powerful tools for authoring QuickTime VR movies to be found, so I wrote my own QuickTime VR movie generator which was specifically designed for this task, along with a bunch of python scripts and XSLT stylesheets to produce and process the various gallery description files and intermediate artefacts. The end result was a complete system which can generate any disposition of rooms from an XML description file and a stock of room models and pictures.
What do you mean by "a slight tendency for over-engineering"?
Then, in 2009, I finally had all of this working together. I chose a nice gallery layout, set my computer up for a week or two of ray tracing, built the VR movies, cobbled together a web site and proudly announced my work to the world with the satisfaction of having finally concluded a long work in progress.
Only, by the time I'd finally completed the first complete version, QuickTime VR was already all but dead and support was rapidly vanishing, even from Mac OS. Now that I had finally completed all this work, no one had the necessary software to appreciate it any more. That was a bit of a set-back.
Luckily, one of the reasons why QuickTime VR came out of fashion was that newer technologies, such as OpenGL and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, had largely supplanted it and made implementing such functionality from scratch much easier. In particular, OpenGL provides support for cube mapping, which is the exact same mapping technique I had been using through QuickTime VR. Of particular interest for this project was the introduction of WebGL, which made these technologies available directly in web browsers.
So in 2015 I once again set out to adapt my venerable gallery to those recent changes in the technology landscape. I found an example of a sky cube for WebGL, and within a few days succeeded in adapting it to my needs and adding the necessary user interface elements. Now, finally, the Gallery is ready to go live again, hopefully better prepared to weather the wind of change.