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ClydeGalleryVR FAQs
We were hoping you could get ClydeGalleryVR to work right away, but perhaps you are having problems. We tested this pretty thoroughly on a lot of machines, so maybe we can help. If your problem is not listed here, please send us an e-mail and we'll try to get you up and running.
My browser tells me I am missing a "plug-in" and the Gallery doesn't appear.
You MUST be running Apple's QuickTime™ to tour ClydeGalleryVR. We put a tag into our page code that should take you to Apple's Web site for downloading, but since we actually HAVE QuickTime™, we couldn't test this for certain. If you need a copy of QuickTime™, follow this link: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/
I can't move from the first scene in the Gallery. All I can do is turn around. I don't see any forward arrow!
ClydeGalleryVR is technically a large QuickTime™ VR movie made up of 10 smaller VR movies that are linked to each other. We call these "scenes". It is 2.5 MB large, which will take about 15-30 minutes to load if you have a REALLY slow modem (24.4). The movie can only "stream" (show you right away) the first scene. It must wait until ALL the other movies are loaded before it will release the navigation controls that take you to other scenes. Watch the progress bar at the bottom of your browser window to see when the Gallery is fully loaded. Then the forward arrows will be available to you.
ClydeGalleryVR is too big for my screen!
ClydeGalleryVR is 400 x 300 pixels. We did this to make the Gallery clear and as sharp as possible. This size is a bit large for small monitors (15 inch) that are running at 640 x 480 resolution. Browser controls and many other application toolbars can reduce your desktop space.
Try these tips.
1) Set your monitor resolution to 800 x 600 pixels (Windows and MACs do this differently, but you'll probably find the controls under CONTROL PANELS and MONITORS or DISPLAY. )
2) MAXIMIZE your browser window.
3) If you can, turn off as many tool bars as you can in your browser. All the browsers are different and have different toolbars that they display by default, but there are ways to shrink them. There are too many options for us to go into here, but the HELP menu (if you have one) for your browser may tell you what to do.
ClydeGalleryVR looks very broken up and blurry to me, I can hardly make it out!
ClydeGalleryVR is set to display best at millions of colors (MAC) or 24 to 32 bit color (Windows). Check your display setting to see if this is what you have. Chances are you are watching it in 256 colors, which looks terrible.
I tried to save the ClydeGalleryVR to my desktop, but I couldn't do it. Why not?
ClydeGalleryVR is save disabled. You can't copy it. But you can come back and visit it anytime you like.
What is VR anyway?VR stands for Virtual Reality. It is a way to present information or an experience in an immersive "world" where you can move around, turn 360 degrees, look up and down, and move from place to place. Computer games are Virtual Reality experiences.
Why did you make ClydeGalleryVR? There already is an HTML Clyde Gallery. Isn't this just simply duplication?
VR is an exciting "spin" for transmitting information on the Internet. HTML pages are relatively easy to create and manage, and they certainly take less time than a VR movie. But some people feel that static HTML pages are boring and ineffective. There are many technologies to give Web pages more appeal, including Flash™ and Shockwave™ movies (Macromedia), various Javascripts, Web cams and so on. Some people like these technologies, some do not. Some find them very confusing, and don't care much for interactivity.
We find the appeal of more interactivity interesting to try out. And it gives the viewer more of a sense of "place" when in an immersive world. VR seems to be an easy way to do this, and thanks to QuickTime™ which has over 100,000,000 users worldwide, it can easily be viewed by many people on the Internet.
QuickTime™ is very stable and reliable. It can handle a wide variety of data types (panoramic VR, object VR, linear movies, audio music and even MIDI music!), so it is a multi-purpose delivery platform.
The biggest downside to VR (or any other interactive technology) is the time and testing it takes to make it work, and also the download time required by the larger files. And changing anything in a VR movie requires a complete reassembly of the entire product. So it could never fully replace HTML. It also requires several expensive software packages to produce and has a pretty steep learning curve.
Static HTML pages are definitely the most efficient way of transmitting a lot of information (especially textual information). They are easy to update and load very quickly (if there aren't too many images!). But, they are static and only hint at a virtual world. They are interactive because of the hyperlinks, but when on screen, they don't move. This makes them static.
We introduced ClydeGalleryVR as the first of many VR projects we plan to implement, if the audience response we receive is favorable to it.
Future projects include: Find the Treats, an interactive game where you can explore Clyde House and find where all the treats are hidden; CATS- Clyde's Advanced Transit System - where you can board a mag lev train and take a ride around Clyde World; and the Back Fence Cat Club Teleporter Project - where you can try out a new virtual teleportation technology for getting cats to the Vet with no stress or fuss.
As these projects will take a considerable amount of time and effort to implement, we will wait for the fans' reaction to this first effort. If it is favorable, we will go ahead with these other projects. If it is not, then we won't bother. So be sure and let us know what you think of VR!
I'm running a Windows machine. Do I need QuickTime™?
YES. QuickTime™ is made in both MAC and Windows versions. Visit the Apple Web site to download your copy at: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/. Be sure and pick the WINDOWS version of QuickTime™.
I have an older MAC and I downloaded QuickTime™ 6, but I got a message saying I couldn't use it!
QuickTime™ 6 works with the more recent versions of Apple's system software (8.6 through 9.x and OSX). You need an earlier version, QuickTime™ 4 or 5. Apple has a page with downloads for older versions of QuickTime™. When you get to the page, scroll down until you see "Download and Updates"
http://www.info.apple.com/usen/quicktime/
I have QuickTime™ 3.x. Will ClydeGalleryVR work with it?
It should. The Gallery uses standard VR code that has been implemented since the introduction of QuickTime™ 3.
When I zoom in, the Gallery image becomes very fuzzy.
That's because you zoomed in too far. Zooming in simply enlarges the pixels in the image until they are so huge they are meaningless. Zoom out again and the image will become clearer. If you zoom out too far, the image will distort. This happens with all QuickTime™ VR movies. In ClydeGAlleryVR, any time you move to a new scene, the zoom is automatically set to its optimal setting.
Why isn't there a control bar in ClydeGalleryVR? I've seen control bars in some other QuickTime™ VR movies, but not in others.
The use of the control bar is optional depending on the supplier of the VR movie. We have had problems with it displaying properly on some browsers so we decided to turn it off. Since you control your experience in the movie with the mouse, it isn't necessary anyway.
I think the some of Clyde's pictures are a little blurry. Yet the other parts of the Gallery seem pretty clear. Why is that?
The pictures of Clyde come from the original Clyde Gallery photographs, re-scanned at a high resolution for clarity inside a VR environment. However, they are old (before 1996) and were taken with an inexpensive camera. The original images were blurry to begin with, so even with a good image editing program, there are limits to the improvement that can be made. Added to that is the compression necessary for the VR movie to be deliverable on the Internet. We think the images are pretty good, though they are not of professional photographic quality.
The golden cat statue really distorts when I move around the Gallery. Why does it do this?
Our 3-D modeling program uses a camera with a 360 degree lens for VR panoramas. Obviously, this is physically impossible, so something has to give. In this case, it is "warp" distortion. Even professional photographs taken with wide angle or panoramic lenses and stitched together to make a panoramic movie (which is the basis of VR movies) will show some degree of distortion at certain zoom levels. The picture you see is actually wrapped around a virtual drum (cylinder) and you are viewing it from a point inside the drum. Your "eyes" inside this drum have a fixed field of view. Anything outside that field will distort or "warp". Playing with the zoom function can reduce some of this distortion.
Why can't I look all the way up to the ceiling or down to the floor?
The VR movie made from our 3-D modeling program is called a Cylindrical VR movie, which is playable on QuickTime™ 3.x and above. It provides a 360 degree horizontal view but a limited vertical one.
With the introduction of QuickTime™ 5.0, QuickTime can be used to make Cubic VRs, which allow 360 degree horizontal views and 180 degree vertical ones. (i.e. you can look straight up or down).
At the time we made Clyde GalleryVR, we didn't know how to render a Cubic VR. We have since learned how to do this.
Keep in mind that this is evolving technology, and one can learn about it only by doing an awful lot of research on the Internet and asking a lot of questions. The trick, of course is to look in the right places and ask the right questions. That's not always easy to do! It takes a certain amount of persistence, and "digging". Fortunately, there are many very kind people who will be happy to help, IF you can find them, and that's the trick.
In our cylindrical ClydeGalleryVR, when you move from scene to scene, you are at a "default" zoom, which allows some vertical movement because the top and bottom of the image are actually outside the movie box frame. Since there is more data outside the box, you can look up and down a little. If you play with the zoom feature, you'll find you can reduce or increase this effect, but always within the limit of the visual data in the movie.
Future ClydeSight2.0! VR toys will probably use the Cubic VR approach, now that we know how to do it.
If you are interested in making VR's using Bryce, e-mail us and we will be happy to send you links to folks who can tell you, as they did us, how to make this work.
Knowing we had this vertical limit in our current ClydeGalleryVR, we made it so there is no interesting visual data in the ceiling or floor.
Why does the picture cube in the Sphere of Light rotate horizontally and then vertically when I move my mouse side to side?
The Sphere of Light is an object movie made from many individual pictures (one for every part of the rotation of the object). There is no virtual object on your screen (like a sprite); instead, there are multiple images of the object, showing different angles of view. The illusion is that you are maniputlaitng an object, but you are really moving from one image to another along a single row film strip.
To set the movie up for vertical as well as horizontal mouse movement, we would have had to create many more pictures (one for every change in angle) and arrange them on a grid (multiple rows) instead of a straight line. This would have made the file size of the movie MUCH larger (each picture, or frame, uses file space).
In order to keep ClydeGalleryVR to a manageable size for the Internet, we used a single row of pictures that would show all six faces of the cube (a cube has six faces, four horizontal sides, a top and a bottom). The trade-off to do this is the horizontal movement limitation. So it shows vertical movement at times while your mouse moves horizontally.
The music I hear is very distorted. Why?
MIDI Clyde Tunes™ are full range multi-layer compositions, sending complex waveforms through your MIDI player to your sound card and speakers through a synthesizer. Some sound cards and speakers cannot work well with this level of complexity. Try these tips:
1. Your computer volume is too high and sending too much signal to your speakers. Lower the volume.
2. You are playing the music through the computer's internal speaker. Internal computer speakers don't have the dynamic range for the power required by the music. Use good quality external speakers or even headphones for improved quality.
3. You are using cheap external speakers. Just because speakers are external doesn't mean they perform well. Try headphones.
The MIDI music is digital isn't it? So shouldn't it sound spectacular?
On a good system with good speakers, it sounds excellent. But just because the music is digital doesn't mean it is superior, in fact, digital music can be just the opposite!
A lot of people are confused about what MIDI is and does, so here is a detailed explanation.
Digital music is simply another way of delivering sound data. Instead of a needle vibrating in a groove (as in a phonograph) or magnetic particles moving the coils of a recording head (as in a cassette player), digital sound sends discrete bits of information to special circuitry that converts it into signals that the speakers use to make the sound.
MIDI digital sound generation is quite different from recorded sound information.
Recorded sound information is compressed and adjusted for playback on a music system. Most audio files (like MP3's and computer game scores) have this built in compression and adjustment, and often a complete sound studio with all its capabilities was used to make the recording. The files are digital (as they are on an audio CD) and have been adjusted for playback on a wide range of sound systems by the content creators. This takes a huge amount of time and talent, and once it is done, it is done. The recording is a snapshot in time of a musical event. It will never change any more than history changes. If someone played a wrong note and it was recorded, that wrong note will be there every time. The only way to change it is to re-mix the recording. On the other hand, if someone played a note or passage in a particularly beautiful way, it too would be preserved.
MIDI music is NOT a recording! It is an actual performance by a synthesizer and is completely UNcompressed. There is NO studio, no adjustment. It is a live performance by a machine. Every time you hear a MIDI file, you are hearing a computer performance, NOT a recording! You are hearing pure, uncompressed and unaltered data direct from the software synthesizer. Every time you hear it, it is brand new. If there is a wrong note in the performance, the file can be changed and replaced, just as you can correct a typo in a word processing document.
You might think of MIDI music like a player piano roll. The music roll in a player piano tells the piano what notes to play and how to play them. Every time you play the roll, you hear an actual performance by the piano itself. This is sometimes referred to a mechanical music because it is music played by a machine.
The sound from MIDI digital music has a higher "clipping" rate because there is no studio involved, no way to check the data that is going through to the sound card for overload.
MIDI Clyde Tunes are polyphonic mulit-timbrel compositions. That means, they tell the computer to play many notes simultaneously (like chords) and many instrument sounds, all at the same time. More sonic data is sent to your sound card. The sound is prone to distort and overpower your speakers because there is no "mix-down" as would be done in a recording studio. Some sound cards have a wider range of data tolerance than others.
The advantage of a MIDI performance is that a LOT of music can be handled by a very small file, so you don't have to wait and wait for the file to download. The MIDI file that accompanies ClydeGalleryVR is only about 39Kb (39,000 bytes). If this were converted to a compressed audio sound file, it would be 2.5Mb (2,500,000) or more!
I can make my browser play the music with either QuickTime™ or the Beatnik™ Player. The sound is very different. Why?
MIDI music isn't music, it is a code that tells a computer how to play music through a MIDI player. Clyde explains this in his "ClydeSight2.0! and MIDI" pages. MIDI Clyde Tunes follow GM (General MIDI) specifications. These specifications are implemented differently by different MIDI players. All MIDI players depend on a synthesizer - either their own built in synthesizer, like QuickTime™ Musical Instruments, or Beatnik™, or Yamaha's MidPlug™ - or one built into the computer's sound card.
GM calls for a PIANO sound on MIDI bank 1. But it doesn't say WHAT the piano should sound like. It could sound like a concert grand piano, or an out of tune upright piano. There are 127 sound banks in a GM synthesizer. Each sound bank calls for a different instrumental sound.
Many synthesizers that play musical instrument sounds do so by sampling. An actual sample of the sound of an instrment is made into digital data, and that is used by the synthesizer. But some synthesizers don't have sound samples, so the try to generate the sound called for by complex mathematical algorithms. These may not sound as good.
Some MIDI banks call for the sound of a flute, some for an oboe, trumpet, and so on. The MIDI player/synthesizer manufacturer determines what quality and characteristics of the sound of each bank will be. The MIDI Clyde Tune calls for the MIDI bank to be used, but cannot control what that bank sounds like. The sound quality is different depending on the synthesizer used.
So a flute on one GM synthesizer may sound very different from a flute on another. They are both flutes, so GM requirements are satisifed, but tonally, they may be very different, since GM is not that restrictive. Different synthesizer manufacturers use this quality issue as part of the appeal to buy their product.
Software synthesizers (such as the ones used in QuickTime™ musical instruments, Yamaha's MidPlug™ and Beatnik™) are generally free of charge. Since there is no profit, the manufacturer isn't going to spend a lot of time on super quality, which is understandable.
So in this area, there may be much more variety in the sound produced. They may all use a similar piano sound, as this is so well known and recognized, but they may have very different approaches to less well known sounds, such as the chorus (which is supposed to sound like a human choir).
Since MIDI Clyde Tunes all use multiple MIDI banks (one bank for each individual instrumental sound) for a wide range orchestral sound, there is more opportunity for a MIDI player to change the overall sound.
MIDI Clyde Tunes are composed on the QuickTime™ Musical Instruments package (part of QuickTime™), so they sound most true when handled by the QuickTime™ plug-in. They also sound very good on Yamaha's MidPlug™. Beatnik™ uses some rather unique interpretations of instrumental sounds, so this player has the most noticeable difference in sound.
And a sound card that has a built-in synthesizer may be altogether different!
The ClydeGalleryVR movie appears with QuickTime™ but the MIDI tune is played by something else. Why?
Your browser can use a number of competing plug-in's to play a MIDI file. You need to tell it to use QuickTime™ for MIDI if you want it to do so. Usually, when you install QuickTime™, it automatically sets this up. But if you have changed it, you'll need to change it back.
I tried to copy the MIDI tune to an audio CD, but it wouldn't play back. Why not?
MIDI Clyde Tunes are available to you only through your browser and computer. They are NOT music files. An audio CD cannot play a MIDI file, only a computer with a MIDI player/synthesizer can do this. MIDI Clyde Tunes are copyright material, you shouldn't be attempting to make a copy without permission. You may listen to them any time while visiting ClydeSight2.0!
Can I play the MIDI music on RealPlayer™?
MIDI Clyde Tunes are not programmed using RealPlayer™ specifications. They may work on this technology, but they are based on general MIDI specifications and should be played by QuickTime™, Yamaha's MidPlug™,or Beatnik™
I don't have any MIDI plug-in that I know of, yet I can hear the music, and it sounds pretty strange and tinny. Why?
You are probably using a Windows™ computer. These machines have a wide variety of sound card configurations, and there is no set standard. Macintosh™ computers have a standardized sound card that comes with the computer.
MIDI Clyde Tunes are designed to be played by a true MIDI player/synthesizer.
On a Macintosh™ computer, this will always be at least QuickTime™Musical Instruments or another MIDI synthesizer if you have put one on your computer. The Macintosh™ sound card does not contain its own built in synthesizer.
Windows™ machines are different. Many sound cards built into these computers have a type of synthesizer built in, and the quality can range greatly.
If your browser doesn't detect a MIDI player, it may send the data to your computer's sound card, which will attempt to play the MIDI music. But the synthesizer built into a sound card may not follow GM specifications, and may not be able to reproduce the proper musical sounds called for by the MIDI Clyde Tune. You should download a MIDI player which has a synthesizer (QuickTime™, Yamaha's MidPlug™, Beatnik™), or tell your browser to use one that is in your plug-ins folder.
To make matters more confusing, not all MIDI players have a built in synthesizer. Live Audio™ (comes with Netscape Browsers) and base versions of Crescendo™ are MIDI players, but do not contain built in synthesizers.
NOTE: Different browsers approach plug-ins (helper applications) differently. You need to find out what to do from the browser manufacturer (i.e. Microsoft for Internet Explorer, Netscape for Communicator, etc.)
Can I play the MIDI tune on my cellular phone?
A lot of hand held devices are developing Internet capability, most recently, cellular phones. ClydeSight2.0! and all of its features are not designed for this technology at this time.
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