gmg tutorials - quicktime object vr player using flash

Object VR in Flash MX

A detailed tutorial on building an easy-to-use QuickTime Object VR player for Flash MX - without the QuickTime plugin.

01 Introduction
02 What should the QTVR player do? / How should the player be structured?
03 Useful reading / Designing the player
04 Loading your QuickTime Object VR movie
05 What have we got so far? / Stopping the spin
06 What is the mouse doing over the image?
07 Moving to the left of the image / Combining the formulas
08 Making the driver handle any movie length / Making the code simple
09 Using the Object VR player
10 What about a loader for this?
11 Conclusion / About the authors / Copyright

Previous << Introduction

What should the QTVR player do?

Here's my list of features for our player:

Work without interaction.
We wanted the QTVR movie to rotate whenever the mouse moved over the movie. No clicking and dragging. This would provide the simplest method of interaction for all users.
Use a visual method to control the spin of the object.
Why do stuff in code when you have the best visual development tool available? We want to visually indicate how much mouse movement should cause the object to rotate once.
Be quick to add to a file.
Because I'm busy.
Be simple to add to a file.
Because I forget stuff.

You may want your player to do more. Maybe it could have a default rotation, or some momentum when using a click-and-drag interaction method. Feel free to add anything you need.

How should the player be structured?

The structure for the player is very simple:

Our main movie will have a scene containing (amongst other things) a layer (named "qtvr") with our Flash qtvr movie clip object. This is where all of our code will go.

The other movie elements that are on the stage are just plain old text, graphic, and button objects.

If you have a look at the Symbol Definitions, you can see that the qtvr Movie Clip contains the actual QTVR mov file that we import (DivingHelmet.mov in our example), and a controller Movie Clip (named "driver") that has our code to rotate the QTVR movie.

Next >> Useful reading / Designing the player