In photographic VR a 360° panorama is displayed in a viewer which creates an illusion of three dimensions because the user can look in different directions by clicking and dragging the image. Photographic VR was first developed by Apple's Advanced Technology Group in the early 1990s and was later merged with QuickTime and given the name QuickTime VR.

Recently java programmers have managed to create applets capable of the same things - to play 360° or partial panoramic images with full cylindrical distortion correction, sophisticated hotspot & cursor support and browser frame targetting.

The image quality is not quite as good as in QuickTime VR but you don't have to install anything to see the panoramas - you just need a java-enabled browser, and who hasn't these days?

Andrew Nemeth's java applet is co-written by Terry Thrift of Thrift.com and incorporating portions of Nemeth's java code from the now discontinued nemMap2 and panoScrl2. We use CylPan at oslo360.com because it seems to be the best Java VR applet around so far. More info from the creator: www.nemeng.com