Available on AppStore

CubeWorld is a free 3D Cubic Panorama viewer for iPhone.

With this application you’ll be able to download, manage and experience 3D images using iPhone touch and accelerometer capabilities. Using its several options it will be possible to tune the interaction with 3D panoramas, so to make the immersion into the images environment a perfect step in the VR world.

CubeWorld can handle remote lists of panoramas, created with a very simple xml format, that can also be linked to other ones. This way, a VR photographer can easily share its own portfolio with a single link (that can be added to other lists too) changing and updating its content in an independent way, while the user can jump from a repository to another one simply following “virtual folders” inside the program, downloading and keeping – for off-line shows – what he likes most.

The GUI of CubeWorld is quite simple to use: in the homepage you’ll see your downloaded panoramas (and you can sort them by name, author or kind – that means the tagging used by its author). Once there clicking on one of them will take you to the panorama info page:

There you can read image info, jump to author’s url, delete the image, or – even better – see it.

Once clicked you’ll just have to wait for images to be unpacked and put in your iPhone memory (their LOCAL – that means you don’t have to be connected at this point)

Then you can see the 3D image – turning around with your fingers and/or with accelerometer (depending on selected options). You can zoom using two fingers – and you can close the image and be back to image info page simply putting three fingers at the same time on the screen (or with a triple tap if you prefer).

But, how can you get panoramas on your iPhone, taking into consideration that when you run the program the first time you won’t see any already present?
Easy task: you just have to click on on-line pano button – and (at that time) be connected possibly with WiFi.

When you get to on-line pano page the program will try to connect to an url with pano list (you can change that url and use other ones) – and if everything is ok you’ll see a remote list of panos. If you click on download button CubeWorld will start the download, and then we’ll show you that now you have the image on your iPhone changing “download” in “view”

You can – at this point – view the image and decide if you want to keep it or delete it. If you don’t delete it you’ll find that image on your downloaded local list of pano when you’ll click on the “back” button on the top of the windows.

From the Options button – in the home page – you can access to the options page. There you’ll be able to modify the behaviour of the program and you’ll be able to wipe out all your downloaded panos at the same time.

Quick notes for VR photographers: CubeWorld handles Cubic panorama images – that’s to say panoramas made of SIX images that are the faces of a virtual cube surronding the viewer. The six image MUST be jpg files 1024×1024 (or 512×512 or 256×256) each and they must be called this way:

yourimagename_f.jpg (front)
yourimagename_b.jpg (back)
yourimagename_l.jpg (left)
yourimagename_r.jpg (right)
yourimagename_u.jpg (up)
yourimagename_d.jpg (down)

The easiest way to share your content for CubeWorld user is to put them on-line and to create an xml file with their info – like the one you can find here: www.marcogiorgini.com/iphone/panos.xml

That file is simply a collection of this xml pieces:

<dict>
<key>Name</key>
<string>Your Image Name</string>
<key>Description</key>
<string>Your Image Description</string>
<key>Author</key>
<string>Your Name</string>
<key>Kind</key>
<string>Your Kind</string>
<key>Url</key>
<string>Your Url</string>
<key>location</key>
<string>http://yoursite/yourimagename.images</string>
<key>Version</key>
<string>Your Version Number</string>
</dict>

Where http://yoursite/yourimagename.images is a way to specify that you put on-line SIX images called http://yoursite/yourimagename_f.jpg http://yoursite/yourimagename_b.jpg and so on…

Credits

CubeWorld is a program by Marco Giorgini, based on an idea of Geoffrey Morelle.

It’s a FREE software but if you find it useful donation are welcome :-)