Welcome to our VR double feature, the second half of that. I'm Rhonda Straatton from the QuickTime team, and I'm here to introduce to you our second VR session featuring Dennis Biela, who has been working on some just amazing projects with QuickTime VR. In the last session, we heard about a lot of new tools and ways to make VR and ways to get into it.

In this session, we're going to hear about some really amazing projects that Dennis has been working on. And a lot of guys have been working on some cool things, but Dennis has just really impressed me with some of the things he's been doing. So, no further ado. Oh, I do have to make one sort of administrative thing. As far as Q&A, we try to keep that to the end.

If you've got a really burning question, okay. But please make sure you have a question. Please make sure you always speak into the mic when you have a question so the translators can get it so that everyone can hear the question. But I'll come back up at the end and host the majority of the Q&A, okay? Thanks.

So, good morning. You can all hear me okay? Everything's working in the back there? I get the thumbs up, I love it. Okay. So, a little bit about myself, since I don't think many of you have taken any of my sessions before or whatever. So I'm that VR guy. You know, when people say, you know, that VR guy, that's me. That's right here.

So, my company's called Lightspeed Media. I also have another company called The Way Ahead Group, because if you're not way ahead, you must be far behind. And Dennis Biela Photography. And basically, I'm just a photographer. I tell people that all the time. I'm just a photographer. Please don't. Don't give me all this information. So, I've been doing photography for a long time. I started in photojournalism. I became a photographer because stick people are tough for me to draw.

You know, the little one-line things. So, I got involved in taking pictures. And I found at an early age in high school that it was a great way for meeting girls, you know, take their pictures. So, I got wrapped up into photography. And after a little while in photojournalism, I started doing a lot of commercial work.

And I specialized in the automotive industry. For those of you who do not know, the automotive industry is an $8 billion a year in advertising. So, I tend to be very, you know, watch them a lot. So, I started doing work for like GM and Jaguar. If I say them correctly three times, they promise me more work.

And I got involved in digital imaging. In fact, I was doing digital quite a long time. I'm a beta tester for Kodak and Canon on digital cameras. So, about six or seven years ago, I heard about this thing on the web. You know, you could take your pictures and you could put together this thing called QuickTime VR. At that time, it was a free set of tools just to play with it, to experiment with.

So, I started downloading it. And if you were in the earlier session, you heard that the automotive industry is one of the largest users of VR. So, I started doing a lot of QuickTime VR for automotive use. I've done some stuff for GMs. I have a project coming up for GM. I'm doing some work for a BMW. So, I've been in it quite a long time.

For those of you who may not have seen VR before, it's basically a series of still images. We can use a lot of different capture devices, but it's a series of still images, whether we're looking out, which would be a panoramic, or we're looking in, which would be an object movie. And we have a lot of different techniques. We'll talk about that. I'm going to switch to the laptop one. Thank you.

And just show you really quick two samples of what a VR is. The first one here I'm going to show you is a cubic movie. So this is a full 360 environment that I can look around in. I did this quite some time ago when Apple was just playing with cubics. It's in Chicago. It's at Christmastime. And I just wanted to show, you know, a nice wintry scene. When I travel around, I do a lot of traveling in Asia, the kids are like, is that snow? So, yeah.

We'll close that one out, and then I'll show you an object movie. We'll talk more about this later, but I'll show you an object movie. And this is an actual aircraft that we shot at the Smithsonian. We'll get into that later. But it's 36 shots, and I can move my cursor.

I can see all the different sides of the airplane. In our Smithsonian project, we'll actually have text and other information and links. So it will be a very interactive piece. But we'll take a look. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We'll talk about that later. If I can go back to my presentation.

So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about three projects that we've done in the last eight months. I'm going to give you a little bit of overview. I'm going to talk you through the process that we go through. I'm not really here to talk to you about developing new tools, though.

I'm going to show you a lot of really cool stuff and give you some ideas. But I'm going to talk to you more about what we go through on our different projects. I found at an early age in photography that it was just as easy to go after big work as it was for small work.

You know, that old additive about, you know, big jobs are just as much as little jobs is true. So I tend to concentrate on, like, major projects. The other thing that you may be interested in knowing is that most of these projects were ones that I created. You know, I went and talked to somebody and showed them concepts and came up with the idea. Very little of our work is somebody picking up the phone and calling me saying, would you do this for us? We have a lot of projects.

But most of them were created by ourselves. I have an associate I work with, and we would talk about different ideas and start looking for clients that we maybe work for. The first one is the Esplanade in Singapore. We have some people from Singapore in the crowd. This is like their Sydney Opera House. It's a huge facility.

It's shaped like a durian fruit. And none of you know what that looks like, but it's kind of like a pineapple. Cut in half, lay it on both sides, and that's their facilities. And they had some interesting ideas for what possibly they could do with VR. We went in there and we started talking to them about the concept of what possibly they may be using the VR for. There's always expectations on the client side. You know, they think that, you know, you should be able to do this, right? And you're like, there's no technology for that yet, but I'll think about it.

And then, you know, they're like, well, I'm going to do this. And then, you know, the client's concerns. Oh, my God, will you be able to do this? And, you know, you have to sit there and go through it. Mac versus PC. This was my only client that had just some concerns.

There were no concerns after the fact that QuickTime played no problem in their system. We went in, we loaded up QuickTime on all their machines because they're mostly PC-based. They ran all the VR. It ran fine, and then it was never a concern again. For those of you that may be working with QuickTime or developing in QuickTime, I can tell you that the tides have changed. I have very little issues now with any major corporations in QuickTime. Before, it used to be like, well, that's an Apple thing.

You know, we're IBM. We can't use an Apple thing. So now it's more along the lines of, oh, yeah, QuickTime, I've heard about that. That's just a download, right? It doesn't cost us now, does it? I'm like, no, no, it's a free download. You can go to Apple's website and pick it up. So the tides have turned, and a lot of people are trying to get out of it. And a lot of people are adopting QuickTime. It became very important to us in a couple of slides that are coming up.

One of the things that is also important is pre-planning. I think a lot of people just come in and they think, we'll shoot pictures. We'll just shoot the pictures, and then we'll author the materials, and we'll put the VR together, and they'll be happy. And you've already built in problem points if you do that. We do a lot of pre-planning.

We go through. We take pictures of all the different areas. We then put together storyboards for video work. We put together real storyboards, and we get the clients to sign off on the storyboards. Because guaranteed, guaranteed, the first time you start shooting, they're going to be like, could you shoot an extra picture here? It's only a few minutes, right? Just a few extra snaps right here.

And you do that. And then you go, and you get to the next spot, and it's like, oh, just another couple quick pictures over here. It's not a big deal. And then the next thing you know is that they have the only marble toilet in Singapore. And Michael Jordan sat on this.

Could you shoot a quick VR for us? It's one here and one there and one in the washroom. And next thing you know, it's like you've got a whole new project going on, and who's going to pay for it? So one of the things that we make sure of is that we have everything approved as to what we're going to do. Now, there's a thing out there called value added. We're very big in value adding.

So I may not charge you for the extra work, but I want you to know that I'm doing it. You know, it wasn't something that we agreed to. So you can see what other things that I may be throwing into the project because I want you happy. Remember, your happiness is my foremost concern. And if I say that really well, they really believe me too.

So this one was a different project. I'm going to show you some VRs in a little bit. This was for Zephyr 3 Partners. It's an agency. They specialize in doing web content for agencies, and they wanted to shoot or wanted to do some things for VR. And they came to us and they said, you know, could we do some interior? So we had to do concepting with them. We did a lot of concepting, a lot of thinking about what they wanted. And then...

It only works in 9, which is a big problem for me because everything I have is in 10, so I have to jump back and forth.

But anyway, it allows me to output these linear movies. So we are outputting these broadcast-quality linear movies so that they could have plasma display screens like you see throughout the conference here. They also had those at the theater so that you could see different spots of the theater, like the library.

You could go see where the library is on the big screens, just as rolling video, to entice you to go visit the library. All right, let me get back to... So Citation Shares, and I need to launch... Oh, we need to go to... Yeah, thank you, you're way ahead of me.

Every once in a while that happens. So I'll be there in just a second. We need to get to my bookmark. Can we switch to the laptop now? I think it's working. There we go. I just love it when this stuff works. So this is Citation Shares, and I'll need to take you to an aircraft.

So we're live. This is not on my hard drive trying to get you there. And you can see that, you know, the different sizes. And for $359,000, you can go ahead and buy that, you know, share that jet. So they have different, like, cabins, stuff like that. And then we can have VR of the interior.

So here's a cubic VR that we shot just showing the inside of the cabin. We used a 3D rendering program called Bryce to create the exterior. So it looks like you're flying outside the windows. And the first thing that the company told us was, "We're too low." Of all the problems I faced, I had it were too low. So I was like, is it really important? So they're like, well, you know, we don't want people to think we fly recklessly.

Okay, no problem. I'll work on that. So it kind of has a distorted view. The client wanted to show like the entire cabin right away, so not particularly how I would normally like to show it. I'd rather have it so it's zoomed in a bit so that we could look around.

But it's a way for people to see it. Their clientele, you know, is Fortune 500 companies. Broadband is not the issue. In fact, some of these people have like T3 lines to their homes. So, you know, as big of files as we wanted to make, they were fine with that.

Interiors, the animations that we were talking about. So like the seat, I can rotate, you know, show different accessories. This seat doesn't do much. It's a lame seat. We have, you know, but we have other seats. We have other seats where they actually unfold and there's like a little place for your drinks. We had to animate the drinks coming in. You know, all that good stuff. So tables, table on there.

So again, showing that, you know, you can -- okay, come on. We can get there. There we go. We can -- we show that, you know, you have these fold-out tables, that type of thing. So their big thing was to animate showing the clients or prospective clients all the possibilities that if they rented this jet for only $359,000, $359,000 per year, that they could open up a folding table.

So -- But actually, they have found that this technology has improved sales. They did a little demo CD. They sent out demo CDs with PDFs to, I think, about 1,000 prospective clients. And out of those 1,000 prospective clients, they had a response of 30. Now, you may say, well, 30 people. Yeah, but 30 people at 300,000. I'll take 30 people at 300,000 every day of the week. So if we can go back to my demo machine, please.

So that was a really good project for us and it started us thinking. This is the National Air and Space Museum, part of the Smithsonian. It's my current project right now. It's rather a huge project. We're shooting over 200 aircraft and 144 space artifacts. The original project was going to go for eight months.

We're now up to two years. There are a guesstimate that we'll be working on the project for two years. I got an email saying, "Oh my God, you won't believe it. We may have more work." I'm like, "Two years?" You know, there's only so much I can love airplanes after two years.

But anyway, so we're shooting a lot of stuff. We're creating a lot of QuickTime VR, and we're doing a lot of really cool, cutting-edge stuff. So let's talk about some of the things leading up to the project. So my initial contact with the museum, people want to know, like, how do you get this work? So I was doing work for another museum, and somebody told me that the Smithsonian was thinking of doing something similar, and this museum was so proud that they were ahead of the Smithsonian.

So as soon as I heard that, I picked up the phone and started calling the Smithsonian, saying, "I hear you want some VR shot." And they were like, "VR what?" You know, so I had to, like, find the right people. This project took me two years just to get it moving forward. I've been working on it for two years, talking to curators, talking to different departments, at the Smithsonian, going through a whole bunch of issues with them. My biggest thing is my contract is 35 pages long, and 20 pages relate to insurance.

You know, like, there's no way I could insure the right flyer. You know, I just don't, I can't get a policy big enough. So there's these new things I keep having to learn as we go through. Prototyping. Prototyping became really big when I started working with the Smithsonian and other larger museums, because for a visual thing, you know, they're not visual.

You know, I tell them, "Well, here, we can do this, we can do that," and I show that to them, and they, like, don't get it. So I have to use their actual pieces. There's a joke in Chicago that, you know, if you shoot an apple pie, a peach pie won't do.

You have to shoot an apple pie, you know, to show to an art director. So, anyway, so same thing with this. I had to actually go in and start shooting aircraft. I had to go in and start shooting aircraft and build prototypes with their stuff before they could visualize what they wanted to do. Expectations. They had very low expectations. We were actually in there showing them stuff, and they were like, "I never knew I could do this.

This is so cool." You know, does it cost much? That's a byword, funding. Funding is always a big byword at the Smithsonian. Clients' concerns. We had a lot of concerns in the very beginning when we started shooting because there was like touching the artifacts. They have very specific rules about touching a 50-year-old airplane or an 80-year-old aircraft.

Mac versus PC. I was really concerned about this because the Smithsonian has an IT department that's the IT department from hell? You know, they're like, "Apple? No, we can't do that." You know, I'm like, "No, no, it's easy. It's QuickTime. You know, take the Apple part out. Just think QuickTime." "But that's an Apple product.

It won't run on our servers." No, it's not an issue, believe me. So I spend -- it took two weeks for them to hook up an airport extreme. They had two people at the facility to hook up the extreme because they weren't sure how well it would go, and they dedicated all day.

So, it took 30 seconds to plug in the Ethernet. It's a government job. Remember, two people plug in that Ethernet cable. And then I'm on the Mac and I say, "Okay, I have Signal." And they're like, "No, you can't. It can't be that easy." "No, no, it's a Mac thing." So, it took me two weeks to get that 30 seconds for them to plug that in. So, dealing a lot with convincing them that the Mac is the way to go as far as easeability, but on QuickTime, no issues.

Showed them running QuickTime on Windows, showed them QuickTime streaming server, showed them all the stuff that they could do without changing the way they're working, and they were very impressed. They were impressed that it doesn't break, they were impressed that it actually works, they were impressed that they wouldn't have to hire extra people to make it happen. So, it was a good thing for us.

Hardware, Apple Computer and Rhonda Strahton, they've been very good to us and they've loaned us some computers to use. So we're using Nikon and Canon digital cameras. Remember, I'm that digital guy in the other world. So we shoot with the Nikon D1Xs and on the Canon side, the Canon D1S.

Make really high meg files, we'll talk about that later. Bogan Lighting, Kydan VR heads, Dr. Lewis has made us that specialized motorized head, Lexar Media with the CF memory cards, and GreyTag Macbeth for color. I've now served my country and God because I've got all my sponsors out there. Thank you.

So lots of hardware. Oh, let's go back for one quick thing. We, oops, I'm going the wrong way here. I hate when that happens. We have these rolling carts. So there's an aircraft in the background. We have the Canon 1DS, and we fire the cameras right through firewire into the computers.

We've had a host of special applications, not a host, a few special applications written for us, but basically we've found it's very expedient to shoot right to the hard drives of the computers, saves us time downloading, and we can also visually see the images right away. We're using five computers, two laptops. There's two photographers.

We have volunteers. We actually have more volunteers now. The Smithsonian has dedicated staff to us, and we have one dedicated janitorial staff. That's what CES is. It's our janitor. We have our own project. We have a private janitor because photographers are messy. So... This is the interior of the new museum. It's called the Hasi Center. It's 200 feet wide and 1,000 feet long.

And museums, the reason why we got involved, or one of the reasons we got involved with them is there's a love-hate thing at museums. We want you to come and see all of our great artifacts. And you get there, and don't get too close. Back up. Don't touch that. So it's this thing of, they want you to come and see everything, but they don't want you to touch anything.

And then the other issue is that a lot of the airplanes are now hanging so that you couldn't even get up close to them. So one of the reasons that QuickTime VR is a major asset to them is that there'll be 100 kiosks spread out throughout the museum. And as you go through the museum, you'll start to see groupings of aircraft. That aircraft will be on the kiosk, and now you can start seeing up close what you're seeing from afar. And I'll show you some samples in just a minute.

Color management was a very big deal for us. Besides the fact that Smithsonian has exacting standards on, like, if something is printed, it has to be reproduced faithfully, just managing all these different cameras. We found out that the different cameras shoot color a little differently. So Apple has this really cool technology called ColorSync, and now QuickTime is supported by ColorSync, so my life is so much easier. And Apple was nice enough to fly out.

Kevin O'Connor, he's a color specialist that teaches for Apple, and Gray Tag Macbeth loaned the calibrator so we could calibrate all our LCDs and come up with the look-up tables for the cameras so that everything matches. I can shoot any camera that we have, even going across brands, you know, whether it's Nikon or Canon, and I can match within 5% the color using ColorSync and ColorSync.

So we have a couple of tools out there from Gray Tag Macbeth. So it became a very good thing because nothing's worse than going through a VR, especially a multiple-row VR, and seeing that the color shifts for one row, right? Just, you notice it right away, it's not a good thing, don't want to go there. Okay. So color.

Next thing is custom hardware. No one airplane is alike. You know, there are always, you know, variations and stuff. And people were asking, like, how do you rotate that, you know? You know, do you walk around it? Well, if you walk around, if you do the marking, you know, every 10 degrees around the facility and walk around, then the plane starts to look jerky. It doesn't come out as smooth as if you rotate the aircraft itself.

So, you know, I'm always fighting budgets, you know, just like any government institution. I'm just a contractor. I'm not even the photographer anymore. I'm just a contractor. And so we're always fighting budgets, and I've come up with all the hardware we could buy. I could buy commercially to do that, and they were like, great, we have no money for that. Okay, well, let me think about it.

So there's these things called baskets, and the baskets are what they move the aircraft around. They actually use them on aircraft carriers to move fighters into tight corners and stuff. So we bought a bunch of these baskets. This is two-inch steel pipe, and we have special fittings made so we can slide the airplane into wherever we need to get so it's centered over its rotation point. Okay.

So we have these, and there's about 150 to 200 pounds of weight. There's a steel plate. There's a piece of plywood and duct tape, because no good project can survive without duct tape. And that's put on the floor, and that's our center point, and then two people at both ends of the airplane start pushing it.

And every 10 degrees that's marked on the floor, they know they should stop, and then we shoot another picture. Now, on occasion, I found out that the floor in our first location, it wasn't level. You know, you get 10,000 pounds rolling, and the mast wants to get to that low point. It's pretty tough to stop it. So another one of those things that we learned.

Lighting. We had a lot of issues with lighting. How do you get light into these cockpits? How can you get into tight places? Again, lots of ideas. We ended up buying $7 fluorescent bulbs. Digital cameras have great capabilities to white balance in multiple color spectrum settings. We used these fluorescent bulbs. We went out and tested a bunch of them and found a particular brand that was pretty consistent. We used those on stands.

We hang them. They actually now have battery-operated fluorescent bulbs, where it takes about 5 to 10 AA batteries so we can hide AA batteries within the airplane to light it up so we can shoot VR on the inside. Again, we have a lot of hardware we had to come up with.

That's Jim's rig on the left, a Kydan spherical head. We have a special -- the government must assume that butts are always 28 inches wide, because all military seats are 28 inches wide. So we have a special stand that the VR head clamps to, and then we can put the VR head into the seat so we can give that view as if you're sitting in the aircraft. We also have what's called a Bogan Superclamp. And that hangs on pipes above so that we can see around inside the cockpit. Now, on the other side, I have my own little VR head that I made out of wood for fisheye lenses.

So I could do four shots with a fisheye. It has a little pin that stops it. Because that cockpit is molded to somebody's head. The shield that comes around is only 6 inches wide. You know, they made it as streamlined as they could in 1932. So there I had some new issues for placement and stuff. Lewis's -- I'll just move this a little bit more forward. And I'll just start this.

There it goes. So on the jet aircraft that we have to shoot, they have like prototype jets, and they have like F-4 fighters, and a whole bunch of really interesting fighters. It takes 15 minutes to open up the canopy because they have no power source, so they have to crank the hydraulics.

So with these types of assemblies, we have to open a window, click, and then close the window 15 seconds later. The camera fires, open up the window, move it to the next position, click, close the window, get out of the way. So can you imagine 15 minutes between the click? So we were thinking about the issue. I had talked to Louis.

So he came up with this automated VR head for us so that we can mount this inside. The jets, we can then press the button to start it, close the canopy, and then it'll start shooting. It'll do its whole roll. It takes about six minutes for it to shoot the entire interior, and then we can open up the canopy again. So within 45 minutes, we're done entirely with the aircraft as opposed to 15 minutes cranking and closing. So a lot of problem solving in our projects. A lot of issues that we have to think about.

This is the view from above. So you can see underneath the airplane are little marks every 10 degrees, duct tape. No good project can live without duct tape. So, and on the other side, that's the bomb site to the B-29. Now, the Smithsonian is putting every aircraft in the museum back to flying condition. If you could add gas to it, you could turn the key, it would fly.

So that's the level of restoration that they're going through. Well, the problem for them is that all the things that go inside the airplane will disappear. You'll never get to see it. So, like, this is the first non-optical weapon system the U.S. government ever had. It was a simple radar bombing site.

So they yanked it out of the airplane and we had to photograph it. Again, we didn't have a turntable that could take it, so we just slapped a piece of plywood on it. And there's a little piece of PVC pipe shooting off the side and this guy sits on this little roller and he lines it up and then he pushes himself off. I take the picture, he rolls back up, moves it over. You know, it's cheap automation.

So, and then we take the actual images and then we'll drop out backgrounds. So like you see on the Steven's Acro, that's the monoplane on the bottom there. You know, we're always dropping out backgrounds for all the different VR. So I'm going now show you a whole bunch of samples. We could go to the laptop.

And I want to launch So I'll show you the first sample. So this is a standard VR, and the problem that we run into is until you blow in the text and all the other information, people look at it and think it's just a toy, right? It's a model. Here we are pushing these big aircraft, and they think it's a rendering, but I can look at all the different sides.

Okay, so I can see all the different parts of the aircraft. How do I shoot it, though? There's the airplane sitting on the baskets. There's our weights in the middle. We have these big blue tarps. So we have two areas in the museum. We have two studios set up with these hundred-foot-long blue tarps, and then I can click and I can rotate the aircraft.

And then we bring in the volunteers, and they sit there for days on end, you know, cutting, pasting, dropping out backgrounds. So this is how we start it. I'll show you the radar unit. This is the final piece for the radar that you saw sitting. So this will be on the computer kiosk. We'll talk about the kiosk in just a minute. And the idea is information would be showing up around it.

So here's the monocoop that we did, the exterior. Again, one shot every 10 degrees. We now have an assembly. We haven't authored anything yet, but we have an assembly like a big arc that they're welding, and we're going to be placing it above the aircraft so we can do multiple row, so that you'll be able to rotate the plane down and see it like a god's eye from above.

The Smithsonian VR is really cool, but what they really love are the interiors. So this is a cubic of an interior of that same aircraft. We haven't put in a rendered sky yet. I can go right. I can go left. Just like the car, I can go above. Come back around.

and go down below. So a full 360 environment. So this is the big thing for the museum. You come through, you go to a kiosk, and now you can start looking at the kiosk, start learning more about that aircraft. So earlier I talked to you about prototyping. Oh, I have to show you this one.

You know, remember the wheels and the tires and the, you know, the spinning it all? So this is a float plane. They put it together on mattresses, so there's no wheels. So my volunteer that works directly with me is a retired neurologist. So he's 82 years old, Doc Harvey. I love the man dearly. And we never have challenges, we never have problems. We're building new pathways. So I have a lot of pathways on this one.

So how we made this work was we have a crane, and I don't have the shot handy. If I find it later, I'll pull it up for you. We have a crane. We brought a crane over, and there's a cable holding the airplane. It's suspended on one cable. And you know how it is. If you tell a person that they have to sit in the same space every shot, they'll never do it for you. They'll be all over the gamut.

So I didn't say anything, and watch the girl. This is my big kick. She's staying in the airplane as we rotate it every 10 degrees, and she's always in the perfect, you know, like she's just looking ahead. I thought we should put water and make her look like a mermaid. Okay.

Going through. So here we are. We're rotating. This is an N3N. I know way more about these aircraft now than I ever really knew about aircraft. This particular N3N was hanging at Annapolis over their ice skating rink. And the Smithsonian was given the aircraft, and they had to go in and pick it up and disassemble it.

And the people who restore the aircraft, it's like they're children. And they hover. And while they're hovering over you while you're shooting, they're telling you more and more. And they're telling you more information about the aircraft. So I know who flew the airplane and all its significance. So let me show you prototyping. We'll do that really quick. So I have a folder.

And I want to show you, so this was one of my early concepts. When they would call me in and say, could you show us some samples, you know, possibilities for kiosks, one of the things that I said is, well, we'll have a QuickTime movie. We'll shoot a video of, say, like John Glenn, which we have, we've already done that. And then somebody could click and then they would be listening to him talk about what it was like to fly in the Mercury capsule, right? You know, that type of stuff.

The Smithsonian, it's really cool, they have 28,000 movie-tone newsreels. You know, old vintage movies from the, you know, like 1900s and stuff like that. They're kept in a room like this called the vault. And the room's air-conditioned and stuff, but the stuff's deteriorating anyway. There's no way to protect it. So we've started taking on digitizing these old vintage movies with their staff, because we can't touch this stuff, which is really funny. So anyway.

So there's all this vintage footage that we're running into. So part of my job now is not only shooting VR and keeping records and all that, but digitizing in movies. And now they hit me with this, which is the best codec to use if we want to come back in 20 years? You know, 20 years, I'm like, I don't even know what the operating system will be.

So it's kind of, it's cool and it's frightening in the same effect because I'm writing the standards for the rest of the Smithsonian, and the Smithsonian is writing the standards for 30 other museums, and everybody holds up the National Air and Space Museum as the reference. The National Air and Space Museum has 11 million visitors per year. It's the most visited museum in the world.

Just as a sidebar, the National Air and Space Museum generates 40% of the entire budget for the Smithsonian. I don't mean budget as in like operating budget. I mean that 40% of the entire Smithsonian's budget is funded just by the Air and Space Museum. So that's how much visitors they have. So prototyping. So I showed them that and they were like, "Yeah, that's cool. What else could you do?" So we had to come back. We had to think. Something that I tried to avoid, thinking.

So QuickTime and QuickTime VR is a really marvelous technology. You know, QuickTime I correlate to being a bucket, and everything I can fit in that bucket I can show. So not only can I show the visual, not only can I show sound, but I can put in programming, right? I can make QuickTime movies control other applications. I can make QuickTime movies that control the whole computer. So this is an early sample, and I'll click, and I can look around right here in standard VR movie, right? Notice that the QuickTime bar goes all the way across, so this is one big movie.

So I want to see the Gemini spacecraft, I want to see the X-1, I want to see the Wright Flyer. Think of kiosks. Always think of kiosks. Internal display is showing you this stuff. Somebody comes up, they see a grouping of planes, they see a grouping of planes in my QuickTime movie.

They want to do that. But now we want to have more information. So you click on the X-15, now I'm pulling, retrieving text in other QuickTime movies. I'm doing that with all in that VR shell. So controlling all the other applications. I showed this to the Smithsonian, and they were drool. All over. It was disgusting. .

We love this stuff. This is exactly what we're looking for. I was like, why didn't you tell me that two years ago? So I show them all the capabilities, but there's always the but, right? You have to wait. You know it's coming, so you get quiet, and they're like, but we have 11 million visitors per year.

How will we make this work on 100 kiosks? You know, people want to spend their time there. So we had to think about it. We came up, and there's a technology out there called SmartCard. And SmartCard technology is basically a credit card. One of the things that we're working, and they have USB card readers, but there's not enough drivers out there for those card readers. Just putting it out there.

So, the thing now is that you'll go to Smithsonian and you'll buy like a credit card. It'll have a picture of an airplane. Marketing, right? We're going to do 20 different pictures, 20 different cards. Buy all 20. $2 a piece. So, funding. It's always about funding. Remember that.

So, on the back of the magnetic stripe, they'll encode your name, your email address, and your mailing address. You'll now go through the museum. You'll start looking at stuff and you'll get to some point, either time or amount of information. And all of a sudden, you'll get into a certain depth. You'll drill down and then a shield will show up, you know, the Smithsonian shield. And it'll say, "Thank you very much, but your visitation with this kiosk has now ended.

Please swipe your card." You'll swipe your card and the servers will automatically know where you're at on the URL. And it'll email you a picture of the corresponding aircraft so that when you get home, you can now open up that email, see the picture of the Apollo or Gemini, whatever, click on the URLs and now go to a website with even more content. The Smithsonian is now growing outside of the brick and mortar, right? There -- before when I would talk to them, they were like, you know, we'll get to that in five or six years.

You know, and I'm like, we should do this now. You know, five or six years. I don't even know what the operating system will be in five or six years. So, we didn't love that. But then we showed them something else. Besides being a revenue generating stream, we went a little bit farther. Now, think about it. If all you're doing is looking at jets and you're swiping your card for jets, obviously, the odds are, I would think, that you're interested in jets.

So, when I did this demo, I did the shield and I showed the card swiping and did all that stuff in QuickTime, you know, drool, again, the whole bit, but there was this little oriental guy in the back of the room and he's like, this is great. I just love -- you're a beautiful person. So, hence the reason why I picked up that line.

So, I was like -- I thought he was a curator, right? I thought he was like some bigwig that I hadn't met, you know, like some director or whatever. And, well, thank you very much and who are you? And he's like, I'm the store manager. Think of all those emails I can send out to people who are interested in.

So, the idea is now building a database of what you're interested in. That's the most important thing. I can show you lots of content. I can show you a lot of stuff, but if I show you what you're interested in, you're more likely to buy, right? You're more likely to buy if you looked at 100 jet URLs buying a book on jets than buying a book on the right flyer. So now, we're starting to create the databases so that the store or the Smithsonian will know what you're interested in. So a big goal.

So, one of the things that I like telling people is always think outside the box, always think of what the other person is interested in. Think of what the other avenues are. You know, I started my career as just a photographer. Now I'm creating VR content. Now I'm creating kiosk content. Now we're starting looking at like how to accumulate all this information to help the client, to help them sell or to help them get involved with more stuff. I'm going to close this and close that, I think.

I wanted to show you one other... Hold on. . There it is. I just saw it. Sorry, having user interface error. Because I can't find-- did I open up that file? Did I put that-- oh, there we go. Must be under VR under NASA. So we were talking about high-res stuff earlier. We shoot with these very high-resolution digital cameras. My Canon can make a 32-megabyte file. Every file, every image is 4,000 by 2,000 pixels, approximately.

I can create tremendous amount of information. So this particular VR is eight 30 meg files authored together. It's a little chunky when I start to move around. This is a 95 megabyte file, but compressed down through JPEG, it's about a 2 and 1/2 meg VR. But what the museum loves is this.

I can keep coming down looking at detail. So my project, even though I have a lot of attributes, even though I'm doing a lot of things, my real project is archiving history. The entire project is based on shooting all this imagery so that 50 years from now somebody can come back and see what the details were on that aircraft.

When the aircraft are hung, they're not scheduled to come down for 60 years. So we're creating a lot of information for them, for researchers, for students, for schools. I'm very big into education. So, you know, we can start taking a look at, you know, lots of information that's all the way back.

From like here. So a lot of information that they can use. I just want to open up one or two shots. We tend to make screen savers of everything we shoot. I will launch... I'll just pick a picture. So let me grab this one here. Photoshop 7, latest, greatest thing. Runs faster on a G5. I could use a G5.

Just in case anybody wants to donate. So let's go here and I'll just zoom in and let's get to 100%. So I have a wealth of information. So Smithsonian loves the VR. They love what we're doing with the VR. But what they're really excited about is that 144 pictures every 10 degrees of every aircraft.

That's what they're really excited about because now they have a wealth of information that any researcher can come back in 100 years, 50 years, 10 weeks even, and start looking at what that was on that airplane and what the interior looks like. In two weeks I start shooting the Enola Gay, a very historic aircraft. Not so much what it did, but it was also the forefront of technology. And they're having us shoot everything, the interior, the exterior. It's going to be interesting rotating it. I'll have a lot of pathways after that one. So if we could go back to my demo.

Demo machine, sorry. So we'll move on. So software we're using, Canon has a product called Remote Capture for their cameras. Nikon has a similar product. So we're feeding the cameras through FireWire right to the computers. We're using iMacs. iMacs are great little imaging stations for capture. And then they've been, the screens have been color calibrated.

Photoshop 7 with the RAW Acquire module. Apple Computer. Sounds like I'm doing an ad, but we use a lot of their products. Preview is a very big thing. Preview allows us to grab these RAW files and just look at them right away on the screen. We don't have to spend time going through like an import or opening up Photoshop.

iPhoto. A lot of my friends give me a hard time, how can you say you're a professional and you use iPhoto? But iPhoto has a lot of great features. I have a lot of people who need to present on what our project is, and I put together little slide shows in iPhoto with music, and then I'll put a QuickTime movie. If it's a more impressive piece that they need, I use Final Cut Express, QuickTime VR authoring studio, and then Mail. The government loves email. And, and, you know, I think they learned a lot from this.

And then we have a lot of people who are interested in the project. So we're going to be doing a lot of these projects. I think they learned that from Apple. So, because I get an average of 30 to 40 emails just from different departments at the government checking on what's going on. And could you email me that? You know? So that type of thing. RealVis Stitcher for doing the cubics, also for doing cylinders, and then VR Toolbox that works. And that's actually wrong. I use 2.1, which runs native in OS X. So a lot of software stuff there.

Content display use. Now, if you thought I knew a lot about airplanes, I know a lot about displays now. So, kiosks. Kiosks is the idea that the kiosks will be throughout the museum as you come in. You would learn about the different aircraft. Kind of like that interface I showed you earlier. But the other thing is, remember, you know, 8 million people per year. So we're talking about plasma displays, like 54-inch Pioneer displays on both sides of the kiosks being driven by the kiosks. Color management is a big issue.

Getting color to match on LCDs, matching a computer display is not an easy thing. So doing a lot of stuff with color. And then handhelds. So starting -- that's a big bug thing, buzzword for museums and handhelds. I'm going to show you this. This is a Palm OS, and this is a Sony Clia, outdated, as of a couple days ago.

So let me go back to Moonsuit. So here's a VR running on Palm OS. Think about renting-- instead of renting the headsets, $10 for a pair of headsets, listening to a cassette, think about renting this for $10. And as you get close to a kiosk, the infrared transmitter triggers content down here that's not on the kiosk. So now, besides being a revenue stream-- always think revenue-- You also have different ways to display the content. You can give the visitors more information. And two weeks ago, the Smithsonian, it was really funny.

discovered... Oh, you can do sound files, you can put together really cool stuff. There's some beta programs out there. Let me do this. So, a few weeks ago, the Smithsonian discovered that the Cliés had a built-in camera. Right? I could take your picture. Thank you for smiling. So, and they've already figured out, well, if we rent these out and then we have the cameras, when we hook them up to the iMac, iPhoto launches and they could print it out and we could charge them for it.

Did I tell you that they always think revenue? Okay, so handheld devices, we're doing a lot of research and development on handhelds. Sony's been very nice to the Smithsonian and our company. They've loaned us several of these units. They're sending a whole box load of these, and we're starting to work on prototyping for rentals and information on the kiosks. The other big thing is education.

Smithsonian is putting in, or the National Air and Space Museum is actually putting in classrooms that will be wired with cameras. I was real excited about iChat, besides QuickTime broadcasting and all that. We have a lot of capabilities. So they'll be bringing in guest lecturers doing the remote learning or the e-learning, and we're real excited about that because all the content we're creating, a lot of the directors are excited about it. Putting this new content in with their presentations.

So a whole wealth of online. We have to start looking at servers, and I'm pushing for the XServe, because they want to take that 28,000 movie tone newsreels, convert them to QuickTime, have them on servers, so that educators from around the world can log on and start looking at this content to use in lesson plans.

Or you can just log on and, you know, just spend all day looking at, you know, like the X15 or whatever. So web use, another big development for them. CD and DVD use, working really big on the DVD side. They actually have numbers and they track what sales are, and DVDs are definitely on a high rise.

You know, it's beyond the missionary phase. It's got a steep curve. So they're talking to us about creating a lot of content for DVDs. Right now what we've done is we do the fake VRs, and there's actually a way in DVD authoring studio to change the controllers. So the idea is that you make your linear movie, but you control it from your VR movie, but you control it by your cursors on your TV handheld remote. So you do a fake VR. You could spin around on the inside of that. I think they did that with Harry Potter. I think they have some VR stuff that's... simulated on Harry Potter. Okay, other cool stuff. Now, I'm sorry, I only expected five people.

And I didn't have time. I bought 100 of these. And somehow I'm down to three. So I'm going to pass these around, but after we're done with the presentation today, I'm going to pull up the-- no, you're at the wrong screen, dude. Back to the demo screen, please. So I'm going to pass these around.

If you would grab that. And everybody, you get two seconds. Please pass it to the next person. Yeah, $5, $5. Revenue generating. I keep forgetting that word. So our latest thing is VR in 3D. So using one camera or two cameras, we're shooting imagery, and now we're creating 3D effects by moving red channels between the two imagery.

I actually have some VR to show you. I will do that in a little bit so you can see the effect. But it wasn't so much just for the average, you know, just joy of putting on those glasses, and if I had a room full of you wearing those, I would definitely take your picture.

But there's a bunch of researchers who are involved, and right now all we're doing is putting in distances. We're putting in these, they're about four foot wide, they have color swatches, and they mark every six inches as reference points. And we have four of these, like, pieces of foam core that we put into our images while we shoot, so that later researchers could come back and figure out how big something is and what the distance is. The 3D is really big for them.

They think that that would be a major thing in the sense of looking at objects and getting more of a dimensional feel to it. So when we were showing them VR 3D, they were like, "Can you shoot every airplane like this?" Let's see, 200 times 2. I was like, OK, how big is the budget? But I will show you that. Making it a business, because originally when Apple asked me to come speak, they were like, you know, you've done this for a long time, and you actually make money.

So we'd like to have you speak about making VR, shooting VR into a business. So there's a couple things that you need to think about. You know what, I'm going to, how can I do this? I can't do that. I'll get through this quick and then I'll put the 3D image back up there for you. I'm sorry. So skill sets that I feel that you need. Marketing.

Marketing is really big. I do a lot of marketing stuff, you know, sending out samples. But you have to know your market. You have to know if that market's viable and you have to find the right people in that market. When I shoot in the car industry, I know that there's less than 100 art directors in the United States that I need to speak to.

I don't need a big ad campaign. I don't need a lot of stuff. I need to find those 100 art directors. when I do VR I pick the project where it makes the most sense and then I start distilling down who it would service how I get there negotiation I have a negotiations always tough and the big problem is is that you know they don't want to pay you you know it's a computer thing right it's only two seconds I can hire a kid for 15 bucks out of college to do this for me so you know the way I start my negotiation is this I tell them you you know I want a million dollars they'll say how much do you want for this project I want a million bucks you know they come back and they say you know a million bucks I said well you don't want you know you don't want to pay me more than 50 cents usually at that point they say I don't want to pay you at all and and so then I say see we've got the dialogue going

The most important items to remember. I have broken them down into three groups, because knowing you're all developers, I have to keep it simple.

Perseverance. As I told you, my Smithsonian project took me two years. I had a lot of heavy-duty competition. People who knew the industry just as well as I did, who probably had access to more hardware, more equipment, bigger budgets than I did, but I kept in there. As people got tired and dropped out, because when you're dealing with a government, their whole job is to hold you back.

So I just kept after it, I kept working, and eventually the tide turned and people got excited, and then all of a sudden the floodgates opened. So now we're talking to other parts of the Smithsonian, and we're actually talking to some countries now. A lot of museums are owned by countries, and we have some places in Asia and North America. There are some places in North America that are interested in hiring us for our services.

Think outside the box. I know a lot of VR people who are, it doesn't matter what business, but they're so focused on what they're doing, they tend to forget that there's peripherals on the side. A good friend of some of us, Tim Petros, who shoots VR, he also has these things called bongo ties. He makes a lot of money on a little piece of rubber in a wood stack. But he needed something to use in his business to hold the cables together. So for me, it's looking at other avenues.

Remember the panoramic file of the interior? Right now we're in negotiations with a publisher to do posters and calendars. It'll just be that long, stripped image with the calendar down below, or for another company, it's just going to be the posters themselves, just a dash. So, I'm going to show you a couple of examples.

And they pay up front. I like that. So, a lot of other avenues. So I tell people, think outside the box. I have a couple of companies talking to us about the handheld devices. You know, just knowing that we're doing research and stuff, they're asking if we could help them with ours. And there's actually companies, I shouldn't share this with you, but since you spent the big bucks to be here.

People have funding for research. So the government has grants, and they're actually-- we're talking to the grant department about a grant on just coming up with the concept of content for this. So there's different things out there that you can do that may correlate to your business, and you could get paid for it. OK, so thinking outside the box, and my favorite and last one.

So, you know, what I do is of value. What you do is of value. You know, I'm sure that when Michelangelo was paying the chapel up there, they were like, you know, telling him, it's great, it's beautiful. They knew they weren't going to pay him, but they made sure he felt good about it. So, what we do is a service.

What I do is help sell products or help educate people. That's my two things. When I take a picture of a car, it's worth billions of dollars in sales to GM. Well, it's not that GM will ever pay me billions of dollars or millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they will pay me.

And they know that the value is of having a good photograph. So, I should be compensated accordingly. So, I tell people when they get involved in projects to remember what the value is that you're doing. And the most powerful thing that you have in your repertoire is no. No, I won't do it for that.

You know, a lot of us get paranoid and we're too worried about not getting any money. So, we tend to like, you know, okay, I'll do it for that. And you forget that you ruined the industry for the rest of your peers. You know, I have to go up against photographers willing to do VR for $25. You know, there's no way that I will do an image for $25. I won't even get out of bed for $25.

Well, I might get out of bed for $25, but, you know, So you understand the concept of what you do is valuable and you should be compensated for, and you should be at a certain level with it, based on your experience and market pressures and stuff like that.

There's a lot of things. I would do VR for a lot less if there's a lot of work that I could do quickly, and I've done that. So something for you to keep in mind is to keep your value up, because when you say okay that you'll do it for that lesser amount, now you've set a standard, right? I know I can get it for this.

And I don't care what you're going to do, but now when they come talk to me, they're going to say, wow, boy, I don't know, I can get this guy to do it for 25 bucks. Well, okay, go hire him for 25 bucks. No, I won't do that.

So it's a very powerful word, and I can actually tell you that I've walked out of rooms and they've stopped me before I left and say, well, but you have all these other capabilities. So always remember what your value is. Always remember what you're doing. So I'm going to go back to the demo laptop. and pull up one image real quick, and then I'll pull up the 3D. How are we doing on time? I got time, right? We're good on time? Okay. Okay.

Yeah, okay. Somebody may ask a question. By the way, for those of you going to ask questions, I have prizes for stupid questions. There's no such thing as stupid questions, so, you know. All right, so this is that stripped image. The screen's a little contrasty, but 90-meg file. You know, I can zoom in.

I can see lots of detail. We're publishing. We're doing a series of 12. Concord SR-71. I get really cool stuff to shoot. So, the Wright Flyer. They're taking a Wright Flyer down for us in October, so we'll be photographing the Wright Flyer. Lots of really cool technology, lots of really cool stuff.

So, let me... I'm going to quit that, and then I'll get back to the VR. So the three people that have the glasses, so put on your glasses, okay, and here I can rotate, and now that engine should be, unless the projector's reversed, no, I think it's right. The engine looks like it's shooting out at you, kind of? Yeah.

Tainasorda? Somebody say yes. Just say yes. Okay, good. I love that guy. So, yeah. So, and the 3D effect will maintain itself even as we zoom in. So it's not like some of these Photoshop plugins where it makes it a fake 3D. We can actually have full rev 3D.

If I can find, there they are. So we're doing a lot of the cockpits. We haven't authored them yet, but we're doing a lot of the cockpits in 3D. Here's the using preview. This looks like it's just jumping out at you at the screen. Here's the still image from the VR, or a still image from the VR.

B29 looks like it's also jumping out at you. So really cool, some of the stuff we're doing. I want to close this. And then if we could go back to my demo machine. I'm sorry, to my presentation machine. I can launch something while they're doing that. OK, good.

So, we're going to take Q&A and I'm going to show you one other thing that's launching on my machine. I just want to reiterate that I've made an entire business and an entire life out of creating VR content. I started out as a little photographer. I'm just a photographer.

And my business has grown. We now have a huge contract with the Smithsonian that looks like it's going to go on for two years. Do we struggle? We struggle all the time. You know, do we suck air like every other small business? I hate when that happens. Okay.

What do you mean QuickTime needs to know all that? It doesn't need to know that. So, okay. Could we come back to my demo machine? So let's go back to my demo machine. I'm going to show you something. It's just-- and I can give you some information today. So I'm going to pull this in. I don't know if anybody's seen this presentation from BeHear. Has anybody seen this presentation before? So BeHear has a VR technology for video.

Now BeHear has struggled like a lot of internet companies. I can tell you that a company two weeks ago bought their assets for this technology, and they're now revving it to 10. So I'll be able to do this and play it native in 10. But this is video VR, and I can look around in a full 360, right? So, we're on the streets of San Francisco. Should be a title of a TV show.

And we've got a, what did I write? It's a Chrysler Concorde, something like that. It's a Chrysler thing. And we're driving down the streets. I've got the camera mounted to the windshield. You know, and it's mounted to the windscreen. And all of a sudden, this guy comes up alongside, and he's like, "What are you doing?" And we're like, "We're shooting video." He's like, "Cool.

Hi, Mom." Alright, so you know how it is in the United States? We're a nation of shy and reserved people. And we don't like to think outside the box and we don't do anything crazy. No, never do anything crazy. But if two people do it, it's a sport.

So there's this sport where you get on these wooden sleds, right, and you go down the road as fast as you can. Has anybody seen this presentation? Okay. So anyway, here, let's go. So we'll start it up. So we've got the camera mounted. It's on a little arm. It's facing up. I can talk about the technology later. And we're going down this street, and I thought this was really cool. So at any point in time, I can start spinning around. There's the dude.

Yeah, right. Oh, sure. You know what? They line the streets with bales of hay because sometimes the guys fall off. You know, and they take spectators out. That was exactly the way it was described to me. I was like, really? And the noise you hear, they steer by drag.

It's all about drag, man. Those shoes have special metal plates in the bottom. And when they want to go to the right, you know, you put the right shoe down. It drags you to the right. When you want to go to the left, you drag it to the left.

So when you want to slow down, both feet go down. I just wanted to show you the ending because I love the ending of this. This guy is like a national champ. He didn't have to compete. So this is the qualifier. That's why they could do this. So we're looking around, you know, just spinning around, doing our thing.

There's the bales of hay. We're cutting them up to the finish line. These guys hit like 60 miles an hour, two inches off the ground. We're passing the finish line. We're going to start off. Well, maybe. And now we're going to sit up because we can get more leverage. Maybe. You know what? We'll go with plan B. The bales of hay. But the camera was okay. So thank you very much for coming.

Some more things coming up. One of the things I want to point out is that the QuickTime feedback form has been moved to Marina, which is this room over here. Come with your questions. And while I'm going through the rest of these slides, if you have any questions for Dennis, please line up at the microphones. And we have a few -- just a couple of sessions tomorrow.

Who to contact, how to contact Dennis, how to contact Guillermo Ortiz for any questions about QuickTime VR at Apple or QuickTime development things at Apple. More information, you guys have seen these a thousand times already. And the QuickTime Content Creation Lab and QuickTime Development Lab is still open for the next two days. Only today until 4:30 because we've got the party down on campus.