Back in the early days of QuickTIme VR, Jook Leung met other QTVR producers in the New York City area through one of the first QTVR user groups, called the EDGE, founded by Terry Breheny. “We first met in David Wagner’s studio, says Jook. Jim Anders of Kaidan and others would meet each month for show-and-tell. Those meetings, together with guiding forces such as VR pioneer Janie Fitzgerald and Rabett’s “Wrinkle in Time” projects, was the beginning of Jook’s transition from a traditional commercial photographer, specializing in photo-illustration and digital imaging, to an award-winning “Guerilla VR” style photographer.

Several months ago, Jook’s work in VR was professionally rewarded with the 2003 Fujifilm Masterpiece Award in the Electronic Imaging category for his haunting “Tribute In Light” panorama, which generated much fanfare and accolades when it was first shown in full screen format on Hans Nyberg’s www.panoramas.dk at the beginning of the year.

Jook Leung, a native New Yorker, now lives and works across the Hudson River in New Jersey with his wife and two teenage daughters. It was his 6th grade English teacher who stimulated his early interest in photography when he gave Jook a Polaroid camera to take pictures for the school newspaper. His interest became more serious in high school, when his brother asked him to repair his broken 35mm Pentax Spotmatic camera. In college, Jook ran the student union darkroom and was photo editor of the yearbook. After earning a degree in Fine Art, he continued with several years of assisting and apprenticing to other photographers and studios before starting his own commercial photography studio in NYC in 1978.

Jook employs what he calls a “Guerrilla VR” style in his personal work, using his body as a monopod and his trained eye to rotate the lens around one point in space, allowing him to shoot without an encumbering tripod. This style allows him to capture moments much as a photojournalist does.

His advertising and editorial work can be seen at www.jookleung.com, his professional VR websites are www.360vr.com and www.360vtours.com.

Jook, you had a long career in traditional photography, doing advertising, corporate and editorial shoots for over 20 years before you switched to VR photography. Can you tell us what the catalyst was for such a big move?

In the years before desktop computers and digital imaging, I had learned the craft of being able to create complex photo-illustrations that did not look like photomontages. Using multiple camera setups and pin registered film masks, I would expose a single sheet of film multiple times, building up to a final image. This kind of work opened a lot of opportunities to illustrate many print ads and editorial work such as magazine covers for Popular Photography, Mac User, Stereo Review, Institutional Investor and others. Alas, in the mid-90s I was burning out and the capabilities of desktop computers with PhotoShop became powerful enough to make my skills less in demand.

Up until seven years ago, I had never done any panoramic photography that required specialized cameras. A friend had showed me his rotating Globuscope panoramic camera, which was very different from the view cameras I used in my studio work. I guess it was in 1996, when I saw the QTVR tour of the Apple Store by Scott Highton, that the excitement about this new imaging technology caught my attention too.

The 360-degree panoramic perspective was especially exciting to me visually because I had spent most of my career putting images down on flat perspective grids. I had admired David Hockney's photomontages that expanded the viewer’s vision, but they too had a rigid rectilinear perspective. Seeing how Apple Computer’s QuickTime VR technology gave photographers a method of using a regular camera to assemble a full 360-degree panorama was awesome.

In my photo-illustration work, I usually worked from a detailed layout and needed to pre-visualize my images, much like a filmmaker frames his shots beforehand. I would establish a viewing perspective and using my photography skills to create a sense of juxtaposed reality through the use of composition, lighting and color. Shooting 360-degree images put me in a realm of pre-visualization that was very new and exciting to me.

One of my first significant panoramas was done in 1997. The QTVR panorama of a photographer shooting a Broadway dancer on a street corner in Times Square remains one of my favorites. Mercedes-Benz later used this image in one of their print ads, preserving the long format and adding shots of their cars in the streets.

How do you compare your work in VR versus traditional photography, in terms of fulfillment?

After spending many years shooting in a studio, I now prefer to shoot panoramic location photography. Most of my favorite panos have a “street photography” genre to them. I call them people landscapes. I feel they are my stronger images because they convey so much more to the viewer’s experience. They’re portraits presented as panoramic snapshots. There is a famous photo by Ruth Orkin - “American Girl in Italy” that I really admire a lot. It’s a great snapshot that really establishes a sense of place and has a feeling of time stopped. The dynamics of the whole environment is what I also want to portray when I see a 360 VR panorama that I want to capture. You can see this in my “Rockefeller Center Ice Rink” 360 VR panorama.

Shooting good candid VR photography is very challenging. You have to get very close to the scene if not right in the middle of it and quickly take your shots and get out. Jim Galvin, another VR photographer, saw me use a rolled-up sheet of poster paper for a monopod and called my approach “Guerrilla VR”.

My personal VR work is certainly more fulfilling and are the ones I care to showcase. I like to get people involved in my compositions because that element raises the viewing interest by at least a few hundred percent. The “Holiday toast” VR pano is from a series what I call tabletop panoramas where the 360 VR is taken from the middle of the table. I made a small pano rig that held a Coolpix 990 camera on top of a wine bottle for this pano. I have more examples on my web site along with a picture of the bottle cap VR rig.

My commercial VR work has the needs of the client in mind so they serve to document or promote their service or product...the usual stuff. When I do traditional photography assignments I also try to promote and sell to the client the advantage of shooting panoramic VR images whenever I can.

Like any studio photographer would, I use to meticulously light my subjects. Now I enjoy working with existing available light and finding how I can use it to my advantage. Later in postproduction, I will digitally pull out my “fill card” and correction filters.

For a time I was using my Seitz Roundshot 220VR camera to shoot museum exhibits for clients. I also tried to use this camera for my personal VR work but it was less satisfying. I went back to stitching images. My shooting style and earlier training preferred the agility and versatility of assembling a sequence of images. I work backwards - I see the image I want to make in my mind and then try to make it happen or prepare myself to anticipate it.

For another period of time I shot virtual tours of hotels and real estate with the iPIX system because I rediscovered that I love using the fisheye lens. Back in college I had fun using a fisheye lens to shoot “Christmas ball” portraits of friends for a class assignment so I had a suppressed and forgotten fondness for this type of lens.

Then the popular Panorama Tools software by Helmut Dersch came along as an alternative to using iPIX software, so I learned this method too and was able to shoot and explore spherical panoramas more freely. Spherical 360 VRs are, for me, the ultimate in panoramas and spherical imaging is the ultimate in what I can achieve in photography.

The “Candlelight Vigil” VR is one of my first hand held spherical 360 VR images using a Nikkor 8mm/2.8 fisheye lens and Fujifilm S1 camera. This combination worked well in low light. As the light of day faded into dusk, I saw the image I wanted coming together for this picture. I got my camera ready and crouched low in front of the candles and took this VR which consisted of 4 shots 90 degrees apart. I had been inspired earlier by Peter Murphy’s own handheld work with the same lens. If I use only one lens for all the photography that I do, this fisheye lens would be it.

Your “Tribute in Light” VR received a lot of attention and won a Fujifilm Masterpiece award, yet you also shot many other stunning VRs of Ground Zero in the days and weeks following the attack, which you have on your website, www.360vr.com. Can you tell us about these shots?

The “Tribute In Light” VR is a wonderful example of spherical VR where seeing straight up, around and down is essential to the whole experience of being virtually there. I think this image successfully evokes an emotional connection with lost spirits of 9/11 through the vertical light beams with the thoughts of the people below it who are looking up. Viewers who saw this 360 VR image have told me that they experienced a real sensation of being there too. I wondered if I was the only photographer who took spherical panoramas from the base of the lights.

I had also wanted to make prints of this spherical panorama suitable for exhibit display purposes. The 180x360 degree equirectangular format is not pleasing to look at if your subject matter extends to the poles. They’re highly distorted there. So I experimented with other image mapping projections dealing with the curved surface of a sphere. Currently I like using a hyperbolic projection that allows me to squeeze spherical fields of view greater than 180 degrees into astonishing compositions of curved space. There is a PhotoShop plug-in called Flexify from Flaming Pear Software that does this. Hyperbolic space is just wild. I love it! I’ve remapped several of my spherical VR’s into hyperbolic images and included them here for this article.

The VR’s taken inside Ground Zero were actually taken by my friend Jim Galvin who was there to assist with the nighttime lighting. He was the photographer and I did the stitching of his handheld images. We added them to my WTC Tribute page.

As a New Yorker, the Twin Towers were a part of what defined NYC. Just a month earlier in August 2001, I had made my 360 VR of the glass enclosed “Winter Garden” atrium across from the towers. A year earlier we had completed a virtual tour of the New York Marriott World Trade Center hotel at the base of the towers. My sister-in-law worked in the Twin Towers and for two days I didn’t know her fate because of the disruption of phone services. Thankfully, she was not in the building and all of her company co-workers evacuated safely before the towers collapsed.

What is the market like in NYC and surrounding environs for VR Tours? Are your customers familiar with the technology or do you still need to do quite a bit of educational work?

With the craze of Internet commerce gone, a post 9/11 economy and another war, the VR imaging market is deeply depressed. It is harder to sell and I need to offer more services and discount prices to get projects going. But in the end, clients are thrilled with seeing exceptional quality VR. We continue to believe the VR market will grow steadily, though not the explosive growth as we had all hoped for.

It’s an uphill battle, but VR imaging is very unique and more niche markets will develop. Of course I prefer to work with customers who already want VR technology. Such is the case with restaurants that have web sites and need VR tours or architectural design firms that need to showcase their projects. I'll continue to demonstrate how effectively it can be used as an interactive multimedia technology.

I managed to convince IDG, the trade show group who organizes the Macworld Expo, to feature QTVR coverage of the 2002 show last year in NYC. For three days I took VRs from the show floor in the morning and posted to their web site in the afternoon. Hopefully I’ll do it again this year.

What are your thoughts on the future of the VR industry - in terms of broader acceptance and use, technical issues, obstacles that need to be overcome, etc.

VR will do well in other areas beyond tourism, real estate and hospitality where these were the first targeted markets. I m looking to working more in architectural VR, historical documentation VR, property insurance VR and photojournalism VR.

At the moment, it seems many of the original innovators in the VR software industry have moved on, like Apple Computer and Helmut Dersch. There are big licensing concerns on the part of software developers here in the US. The fear of infringing someone s patents and intellectual property rights continues to keep developers away from this industry.

We are waiting for Ford Oxaal of Pictoshere to play his cards on the licensing of his intellectual property for which he has several spherical imaging IP patents. Mike Quan, Jim Galvin and myself met with Ford Oxaal in January of 2003 and we felt his message and intention was to help disperse the legal cloud over the VR industry and give VR producers appropriate licensing (with iPIX immunity, he says) through his software products. No rumors, but I can t help but think there might be or should be a cooperative effort between Helmut Dersch and Ford Oxaal.

What do you think of VRMAG?

My first awareness of VRMAG was several years ago. Like fine Swiss craftsmanship, the quality of the VR I saw was very high, it was a level I’d aspired to. So now I am very flattered to be recognized by this international group from Europe. I’m also glad to hear that the folks behind VRMAG and the IQTVRA will be working closer together, along with Hans Nyberg of panoramas.dk.

Hans has been phenomenal in his promotion of high quality QTVR. He early on recognized and helped promote my "Tribute In Light” VR and I also managed to give him the very popular “Times Square New Year 2003” VR. His use of web logs has spread additional awareness for QTVR. Peter Murphy in Australia, Marco Trezzini in Switzerland and Erik Goetze in the US are also promoting VR with their own web logs, as are others.