[X] My Assistant

[mhoward]

Experimenting with some new tools in MMB to make panorama movies, I made a long Victoria Crater drive movie. I've posted it to YouTube here. The picture quality on YouTube is terrible, but you may sort of get the idea. Unfortunately I don't have bandwidth to post a better resolution version. Comments welcome (other than 'the video quality is terrible').

[dvandorn]

Michael, I think the pans work well conceptually. The problem Pando had (and I had to a lesser extent) is that your panning isn't following a natural eye-scan process. When we, as humans, stop and take in a scene, we actually move somewhat quickly from one interesting point to the next. If you sped up the movement from, say, ground to horizon, or from far wall to nearby cape, and then lingered on quick zoom-ins of interesting points, it would follow the pattern of human scene-scanning a little more closely.

Also, people have consistent patterns as to how they scan their visual scene. In most western cultures, we start scanning a scene from the upper left to the lower right, and our "hot spot" (where, interesting points notwithstanding, the eye tends to gravitate towards) lies about two-thirds of the way up from the bottom of any natural framing. (If you analyze how the eye scans a page of text, for example, it starts at the upper left, scans down diagonally to the lower right, and then bounces back to a point centered side-to-side and about two-thirds of the way up from the bottom. You can apply this general pattern to most naturally-occurring visual frames.)

Part of the reason western cultures use this large-scale scan pattern is due to the way in which written language is formatted on a page. Many oriental cultures scan their visual scene somewhat differently. But we all share the pattern of jumping from one interest-point to another and letting our peripheral vision fill in the "background."

-the other Doug