Colleagues,

It's my first post here, so first of all hello to everybody!

I would like to invite you to see my puzzle collection. It's very small and doesn't contain any rare items, but I hope that you'll enjoy the unusual format of the presentation (QTVR means QuickTime Virtual Reality). The only special thing you need is Apple QuickTime Player to be installed on the computer, it can be downloaded from http://www.apple.com.

Link (it's one level up to let you choose either small or full-screen version):
http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/worldwidepanorama/wwppeople/html/VladimirPopov.html

To see the whole scene just drag the initial view left/right/up/down.

That is very attractive. You must be a very enthusiastic photographer to use the lighting, colors, and shapes so stylishly in an interactive picture.

Some of your puzzles are rarer than you think: The "Skewb Diamond" was unavailable for many years. Meffert sold a small number of them last year, but they are all gone now!

It's very stylish indeed. I like the interactive view.
I downloaded the Quicktime alternative though. I like it better.

Very cool. Thoughtfully presented

Pretty cool.

That was awesome. VWP was right, and I'd pay a lot of money for that Skewb Diamond!

Really neat, how exactly do you load this to quick time?

The easiest way to create QTVR is to use any automatic stitcher, such as REALVIZ Stitcher (http://www.realviz.com): you just load your pictures, roughly arrange them, then stitcher makes all adjustment job and creates panorama that can be saved either as a plain image or as .mov QTVR file.

Since I use film camera, my source scanned images are of less quality than digital ones, so I chose a more tricky way that grants me more control on each step of stitching.

First I use Panorama Tools by Helmut Dersch to create one panoramic image in Photoshop .psd format. I choose identical points on adjacent images manually and Panorama Tools calculates pan, tilt and roll angles of each image and creates Photoshop file. Sometimes I set some of these angles manually to improve the result.

The second step is the trickiest: I have to make seams invisible. Since I don't use a tripod to turn camera exactly round lens nodal point, there always exist some parallax in the scene, so I have to paint the exact position of each seam thoroughly using Photoshop layer masks. Another problem is great discrepancy in brightness and colors between images, especially on sunny shots, so I adjust each of three color channels (Red/Green/Blue) separately, that is for each seam I adjust three pairs of grayscale images - it's much easier than to adjust colors. After all these adjustments I save picture as plain TIFF.

The third and final step is the easiest: I just load plain panorama into Pano2QTVR utility (http://www.pano2qtvr.com), set all necessary parameters such as initial angles and quality, and finally get QTVR .mov file. Basic version of Pano2QTVR is free, so you can try it with any image, even non-panoramic.

So, QTVR stitching is a little bit similar to puzzle building

You can find more information on the topic by searching for "QTVR tutorials".