19 August 1998
QuickTime Revolutionizing Scientific Imaging
by Ben Wilson
Reprinted from MacCentral Online

In the latest ground-breaking use of QuickTime technology, a group of scientific engineers have used QuickTime VR in conjunction with a scanning electron microscope to create a rotatable, 3D model of a microfossil specimen. Patrick Lyons, on of the engineers who devised this method of imaging told MacCentral, "We believe (this method) will revolutionize the way scientific material is illustrated.

The massive importance of this step forward is that instead of viewers only being able to see images generated by scanning electron microscopes as flat images on a sheet of paper, they can now manipulate an object and view it from all angles. "Instead of just a series of static images the viewer has the ability to examine a virtual copy of the specimen. We are not aware of any previous combined application of QuickTime VR and SEM ( in the scientific literature." said the scientists.

The developers of this method also add that a benefit of QuickTime VR is that with proper preparation the final movie is relatively easy to generate. The process was as follows:

"Once the images were captured they were imported to Photoshop 4.0 to be digitally edited. Backgrounds were removed and both brightness and contrast were corrected. They were then exported as PICT files into Apple's QuickTime VR Authoring Studio software package. From within this package, all the various attributes of the final movie can be configured; i.e. starting frame, the number of frames per second, the height and width of the movie, type and amount of video compression. Hot Spots were created in QuickTime VR Authoring Studio".

The products used to produce the QuickTime VR object movie were an Apple Power Macintosh G3 with 160 megabytes of memory, Adobe Photoshop 4.0, Graphic Converter 3.2 and Apple's QuickTime VR Authoring Studio. The QuickTime VR, created completely on a PowerMac G3 object movie, is approximately 650K and is available for viewing at http://www.earthsci.carleton.ca/paleo/1998_2/lyons/figure1.htm.