Nearly 20 years ago, Apple tried their first attempt at Virtual Reality, by introducing standard base on QuickTime
Ultimately this attempt failed, but it is an important footnote in VR History.
Last night, while cleaning the catacombs, err, my basement, I found the first Quicktime VR disk, still sealed in the original case. I was one of the few 3rd party developers who worked on some products using QT VR (a medical app). We had no dedicated hardware glass to view the output, which may have been one of the reasons it failed. Instead one viewed the QuickTime video on the screen, using the mouse to scroll or rotate in all directions. It did introduce the idea of two different VR patterns: the panoramic view (looking outward) and the object view (looking inward at a 3D object you could rotate). Another reason for the lack of success was the timing, it was too early. There were few 360 cameras at the time, none of them not high cost. Most panoramic views were created by taking photos in all directions and stitching them together. Most object views were actually rendered in 3D graphics. Graphics were too slow to render the object in real-time, so generating an object movie actually made sense. I wonder what could have been done if we had the hardware back then.
