QuickTime VR

The Netscape Color Cube

This QuickTime VR movie is a visualization of the Netscape color cube as an object in virtual reality. The color cube contains 216 colors arranged in a 6 x 6 x 6 cube. The red, green and blue color values are mapped to the x, y and z axes of the cube.

A flat view of the color cube

A view of the color cube in QuickTime VR (Click and drag on the cube to spin)

The model consists of 216 spheres. It was designed with VIDI Presenter 3D and rendered with MacRenderMan.

A simple custom shader was used to automatically assign some of the color values, which was much easier than manually setting the color for each sphere. The shader used the "constant" method of color shading, which tends to flatten the spheres into uniformly colored discs. Presenter 3D saved the frames with QuickTime JPEG compression. The compression rate was set fairly high, and some color distortion is apparent, but the file is still quite large at 360K.

For more information, see this article on the Netscape color cube strategy .