Caching to eliminate the loading time?

[thomasvandenabeele]

Hi Ruud and others,

First of all: great app, we enjoy using it. I have a question though: is there a way to eliminate the loading time for each transition? It seems like it should be perfectly possible to keep a lot of images in memory, given that the files are typically not that big. It would make the experience more immersive.

Thanks,
Thomas

[Ruud van Reenen]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for the kind words, glad you like the app!

The issue with transitions isn't that the memory would not be able to hold the images, but during loading of the images the screen freezes for a short while, this ruins the VR immersion experience. That's why a black screen was chosen so the freezing isn't so obvious. Tests showed that the black screen was the least annoying workaround...

The freezing happens due to images having to be uncompressed and pushed to the GPU, which doesn't seem to happen fully asynchronous in Unity3D (the software used to create VR Tourviewer).

As soon as I have found a solution for this, I will definitely add fades and/or zoom transitions, since they work very in Pano2VR indeed!