Picture This: Spherical Photos Enter Cyberspace
The brave new world of photography is neither flat nor round: it is a sphere you can step into--virtually.
These are “immersive images” in cyberspace endowed with 360-degree panoramas to be explored wherever your eye will travel--all around the room, up to the ceiling or down to the floor, zoom in or out.
While seated at your computer, you can tour a living room in another state; peek out the sunroof of a new Toyota; look up from the field of the Super Bowl.
The first glimpses of these wide-angle scenes are popping up on the Internet and on CD-ROMs--from Rent Net’s national apartment listings to Princess Diana’s funeral on CNN’s World Wide Web page (https://www.cnn.com).
Education, entertainment, advertising, business. The possibilities seem endless to those familiar with Interactive Pictures Corp., or IPIX, the small, privately held software company behind the technology.
“We may give new meaning to [Microsoft’s question] ‘Where do you want to go today?’ ” said James Phillips, IPIX’s 45-year-old president and chief executive officer.
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Founded a decade ago by former scientists from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the company spent years fiddling with video applications for robots in nuclear plants, then monitors for the security industry.
But it wasn’t until the company introduced the spherical still photos it trademarked with the consumer-friendly name PhotoBubbles in 1995 that it found its niche.
From TeleRobotics International to Omniview Inc., the company’s name has changed as often as its direction. This year, it became Interactive Pictures (https://www.ipix.com) and switched the product name from PhotoBubbles to IPIX, (pronounced EYE-pix) in hopes that the two will become synonymous.
“We want to be the Coke of this industry,” Phillips said. “I can’t wait until kids are saying, ‘Mom, I am going over to Scotty’s to IPIX.’ And Mom thinks that’s all right.”
Already, Toyota (https://www.toyota.com) and other car makers give IPIX tours of new car interiors on their Web sites. The National Football League (https://www.superbowl.com) uses IPIX for sweeping panoramas of stadiums and games at field level. Several national real estate companies let clients remotely tour properties using IPIX.
John Hendricks, founder, chairman and chief executive of Discovery Communications Inc. and its assorted holdings--including the Discovery Channel--thinks IPIX is a critical advance.
“I think what we are witnessing through IPIX is kind of the first step toward tele-presence. You can capture a site, a place, a destination in its totality, not just one slice of it,” he said.
“This is kind of the film of the Web. It will do what color film did for magazine publishing,” he said.
His Bethesda, Md.-based company is an investor. So is Motorola Inc. IPIX will only say the investments have been in the millions but neither translate into a controlling interest.
Phillips, a Tennessee native, arrived at IPIX about a year ago from Motorola, where he headed its multimedia markets division. Before that, he was co-founder of SkyTel Corp., the top paging company.
“Any time you can overcome time and space, there is money to be made,” he said.
Phillips renamed the company, bolstered the sales staff and opened a Silicon Valley sales office in Santa Clara.
He moved the headquarters from Knoxville to its roots in Oak Ridge--just a stone’s throw from the national lab, a federal energy research facility focusing on defense, aviation and related industries.
The company’s production studio in Oak Ridge can create the images for about $50 apiece or you can create your own with IPIX’s hardware-software packages.
The packages include a camera--either a 35mm film or a digital electronic camera--with an 8mm 185-degree lens with which the photographer takes two wide-angle shots--front and back.
There is a special rotator attachment for a photographer’s tripod to precisely swivel and position the camera for the shots, and computer software to merge the two images into one.
The film-based packages cost about $2,000, and the digital packages cost about $15,000. The company also gets money for every completed image by installing a meter in its “builder” software--like a roll of film you get only so many images before you need a new CD.
In September, the company successfully defended its technology from patent infringement by Live Picture, a company headed by former Apple Computer chief executive John Sculley.
Live Picture agreed to stop using photo bubbles in its Photo Vista product, while both companies agreed to future collaborations.
Jed Katz, vice president of Rent Net, which provides Internet rental listings for 1,500 cities, said clients love IPIX.
“If somebody is possibly making a decision to rent a place before they even see it firsthand, this is the tool that will allow them to do that,” Katz said. Unlike the standard one-dimensional pictures it also posts, “This shows them not just the best side of an apartment building, but it shows them all around, the ceiling and the floor.”
