I am happy to announce that the first Pano2VR 2.3 beta has been released early this week. The major new feature is the addition of sound (see this demo) but this version contains a lot of other improvements.

Some of the new features are:

• Background, directional and effect sound within the panorama (Flash 9/10 only!)
• Effect sounds in the Skin
• Sound controls within the Skin (Play/Pause/Stop, change volume)
• Improved tree view within the Skin editor (hide elements, fold/unfold)
• Improved drag & drop in the Skin editor with auto scrolling on the edges
• Invert mouse wheel direction
• Invert mouse control direction (for touch screens)
• Skin: Start/Stop auto rotation action
• “*” hotspot proxy to match all hotspots
• Skin: UTF-8 support for setText action
• Skin: Mouse X/Y as modifier value
• Conversion keeps ICC profiles in TIFF files
• Updated to Qt 4.5.1 library
  This breaks older HTML templates. You need to check now for “true” instead of true if you use checkboxes
• Crash bug in conversion fixed.

Karyn was kind enough to produce a quick introduction in record time.

You can download the new beta version (as always) from the Pano2VR download page.

…and in our case those showers helped to grow new production elements for our tutorials. We would like to bring to your attention the new introduction and ending which we have added to the tutorials. Not only do these animations bring production value to our tutorials but we hope they also add some entertainment during your viewing.

As always the tutorials can found here.

I just released a new beta version of Object2VR. The new features are:

• Area Hotspots
• Improved Light Table
• Domain lock/Expire date
• Skin editor with Hotspot proxies (as in Pano2VR)
• Updated to Qt 4.5.1 which should give faster screen rendering
• A lot of bug fixes

There are still some things missing for the final 2.0 release but this is another milestone to this goal. You can download the latest beta from the Object2VR download page. For bug reports and other comments please use the forum.

Hopki Media provides Skin Packs for Pano2VR to help you to get started with the skin editor and provides additional skins aside from the default skins included with Pano2VR. They also create customs skins for you to give your panoramas a unique look if you don’t want to learn to create your own skins.

Visit their website to find out more.

I just released Pano2VR 2.2.3, the first release from the new Garden Gnome headquarters. Moving turned out to be more hellish then expected so this took a while. Still to many boxes all around the place.

Anyway: The following things have been changed/fixed:

• TIFF 32 bit support fixed
• User data placeholders in output file name
• Current position naming in patch tool fixed