rork wrote:

Hi all,

After a full day of browsing the Kolor PTP forum and the krpano site, I'm still a bit unsure about the things that can/cannot be done when 'porting' the tour to a (i)Tablet or Phone...
And it would be nice to answer these to a potential client, I couldn't answer all these this morning. And as the trial doesn't let me export mobile tours, so I cannot experiment.
(Saying that, it would be nice to have a more functional trial. I don't care about big ugly hardcoded watermarks, as long as I can test online.)

But basically I want to create a company walk-through with video on top of monitors, multiple hotspots that will show images or video popups, audio in the background and 'directional' audio on hotspots, a map or a panorama navigation 'strip' for the full tour. When I looking into the mobile export support, almost all was like no.., no.., no.., no.., ehmmm... no......

And you want all this to play back well on iPhones and iPads?

I think that may be beyond the technical capabilities/capacities of those devices....

So if someone would be so kind to answer the following questions for tablet export, it would be great...

I'll have a go ...  others will correct me if I get it wrong I'm sure.

- integrated video (e.g. on top of a tv), as far as I could find is not possible.

Embedded video is not supported at all in current version of PTP when building mobile-compatible tours for i-Devices. The current version of PTP does not incorporoate the krpano videoplayer.js plug-in.

Will the export create the slideshow mentioned on the help pages, of is that a manual process?

?????????????? what slideshow...

- panorama resolutions? Again, will this be automatic for tablet and phone, or do I have to create optimized, smaller versions for a tablet and/or phone?

It will be automatic, but as far as I know there is not yet any difference in output generated for iPad 2 vs. iPad 3.

- panorama fovs, is it 360/180 or 360/45 as mentioned in the help files. Or 360/180 and crop it in the editor?

In the current V1.8 PTP the min. pano FOV to permit i-Device compatible output is 360 HFOV and 45 VFOV. Cropping on 360x180 within PTP using the Crop tool in the hotspot editor works too.

- hotspots. Can I use custom build hotspots, and will these transfer to a mobile version without issues?

What image format(s) were you hoping to use for these custom hotspot graphics?

- hotspot links to video. Obviously I cannot use flv for the video, but will a hotspot link to a videofile (e.g. mp4) work?

Not in current version of PTP because it does not incorporate the krpano videoplayer.js plugin.  I believe you can link to a video file outside the tour via a URL link.

- lensflare/map not possible because it's flash?

Which sort of Map? You can use the Map feature; but not The Panotours Map feature - with a Bing or Google or Openstreetmap map layer - because that's currently using a Flash plug-in.

- panorama 'strip' for navigation, is that Flash based too, or can I use that for navigation on a mobile device? Although it might be too small for a Phone though.

Thumbnails and Thumbnails stacks features work in mobile-compatible tours. With the limitation you mention resulting from small display size and resolution.

- audio. As far as I can tell, I can have ambient/background audio, but no directional/hotspot audio due to iOS restrictions?

Correct.

What would be nice as well, is to have a proper "mobile restrictions" page on the Kolor website. There's a ton of similar questions on the forum, and a simple checkbox page, like the PT vs. PTP page, would answer most questions. I do understand technical stuff is changing all the time, but it's all very confusing atm.

Some of the will-work/won't-work stuff is quite subtle and might be hard to present in a yes/no table.

But I agree it would help to spell it out.

Of course there are at least four different 'mobile-compatible' scenarios, and one can probably further differentiate within these categories:

1. Apple i-Devices.

2. Android devices that support Flash.

3. Android devices that don't support Flash.

4. The upcoming Windows RT tablet environment.

Of course the situation changes as the software - from both krpano and Kolor develops too. But then any table of limitations could be updated accordingly.

E.g. It took me some amount of searching on the forum to find out you -dont- need the ipad/phone license as mentioned on krpano.com, to create mobile tours in PTP. Obvious maybe, but hard to find info on the Kolor site.

I think PTP documentation states that one can create i-Device/mobile-compatible tours and makes no mention of requiring any additional krpano stuff. And that's because it's not required.

Any tips/forum pages/blogs on moving around the most common problems would be great!

Regarding workarounds.  I guess you are aware that PTP contains embedded krpano licences that can be exported from PTP allowing you create tours using hand coding quite independently of PTP using any krpanotools and plug-ins?

Last edited by mediavets (2012-07-23 16:40:15)

rork wrote:

Thanks for the answers
But it seems I was not entirely clear on some things. It's always hard to get your thoughts in understandable writing.

First of all, I do not expect all stuff to work on mobile devices, but looking at it it's a small list compared to a full tour for now..

If i-Devices are your sole/primary target audience then I think it would be best to create a version of the tour just for those devices rather than trying to come up with a navigational schema that works well on both large display Flash-enabled platforms and small display i-Devices.

As you appreciate you need to keep the navigational UI pretty simple for small display i-Devices.

krpano has the capability of delivering a different tour UI depending on the type of platform being used to view the tour, but PT/PTP doesn't (yet?) offer support for such functionality via the GUI.

Most of the restrictions relating to i-Devices are consequences of the current limitations of iOS and the i-Device hardware. For example multi-resolution tiling is not supported due to memory management limitations.

To answer some of your questions/comments:
- Regarding video playback, according to the krpano site it seems if I would add the videoplayer.js, this should get video to work for mobile devices.

No, I don't think so  - because videoplayer.js plug-in is a component of later version of the krpano viewers than is incorporated/supported by the latest version of PTP. You would have to create the tour using krpanotools to access the krpano videoplayer.js functionality I think.

On the other hand, it seems that it would be "click to start", and iPhones will play full screen. And that might cause more trouble than it's worth.

Indeed.

I'll have to look into an external link for video, or iFrame. At least I hope -that- works on a tablet or phone.

Perhaps a URL link to a Youtube video? I don't have an i-Device so can't tell you how best to go about it.

- the slideshow I was talking about is something I misread in the helpfiles, sorry.
When one embeds a video into the panorama, the help file states you'll get a animated hotspot sequence. I misread a type of animated gif.

In fact as I recall that's exactly what you do get - pulsing rings implemented as an animated GIF.

- hotspots, as they are basically flash, I was looking into other means of creating them. Maybe a rotating set of png's or something.

If you don't need/want animated hotspots then just create and use custom PNG graphics, PTP/krpano will 'honour' transparency in the PNG format.

The animated hotspot graphics in the default set of themes are not Flash, they are animated PNGs, and they work on i-Devices just the same as on Flash-enabled platforms.

- lensflare/map, yes I was talking about the tour map option. Like a floorplan with all the panos there. But that's all flash, so a no-go for mobile.

Lens flare doesn't work on i-Devices, but the Map (as opposed to the Panotour Maps) feature does work on i-Devices.

- thumbnail stacks, good to hear that works, although for an iPhone it's useless due to size.

Depends on how many thumbnails you need I guess?

- xml tweaking, not really want to go there, but probably end up doing it anyway

We are expecting V2 of PTP in the Autumn, perhaps that will include more x-platform functionalty for i-Devices.

Last edited by mediavets (2012-07-23 18:30:32)

rork wrote:

- iFrame etc., I don't have a iPad either, so testing would be a bit difficult

You can partially emulate an i-Device on a desktop using the Apple Safari browser - on Mac OSX or Windows - and setting the browser user-agent to an i-Device setting - see screenshot below.

The HTML page generated by PTP when selecting one of the HTML template options, and choosing to output both 'desktop' and mobile-compatible' outputs, invokes a script that detects the browser user-agent of the platform being used to view the tour and loads the appropriate Flash or HTML/javascript version of the tour accordingly.

You can see this happening by switching the user-agent setting and it will switch between Flash and HTML/javascript versions of a tour.

...........

Something we've not mentioned is the gyroscope navigation feature supported on some recent i-Devices. Just move your i-Device from side to side and up and down and the pano view changes accordingly - I've seen it working on an iPhone 4 and it's very striking.

Last edited by mediavets (2012-07-23 21:34:12)

rork wrote:

The gyroscope navigation is pretty cool, for mobile devices this definitely enhances the experience.

I mau be mistaken but I think it - currently anyway - only works on the more recent i-Devices.

I'll have some more testing to do with PTP, and hoping the client will accept the stuff offered. Than it's off to the shop to get PTP :-)

cheers,

rob

One thing I forgot to mention is that on i-Devices there are no tooltips displayed - pop-up titles on thumbnails for example - because the touch UI on i-Devices does not (cannot) support the concepts of 'on hover'/'on over'