CleVR

» see clevr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The name is a contraction of Clementine Virtual Reality, which tells you how old the thing was. Clementine, a British studio, put CleVR online in November 2000 as a place to manage QuickTime VR content, and for the first six years the public could not upload anything to it. What you got was Clementine's own virtual tours, viewed in whatever QuickTime build you had, back when a spinning room on a web page was still a party trick.

October 2006 is when it became the site people remember. The whole thing was rewritten from scratch, QuickTime was dropped, and the panoramas were served through a Flash viewer Clementine built themselves. Anyone could sign up and upload. The old content was imported into the new platform, and the formal launch followed in April 2007. Behind it was PHP with image storage on Amazon S3, which in 2007 was a respectably modern stack for a company whose product predated the iPod.

The free stitcher is what gave it reach. CleVR Stitcher shipped on 5 September 2007 as an Adobe AIR application, written in Flex and ActionScript, running on Mac and Windows with a Linux alpha. It did less than the serious stitching tools did, which was deliberate: you pointed it at a handful of overlapping photos, it found the seams without being asked, and the finished cylindrical panorama went straight up to your account from inside the app. The last build was dated 6 August 2008. Ownership moved to Sphex LLP somewhere along the way.

~ the record ~

~ what the viewer did ~

The viewer was the reason to use CleVR rather than host the image yourself. It behaved the way YouTube's embed did, as a block of markup you dropped into your own page, except what came through was a draggable scene rather than a video. The clever part was the projection: it took the equirectangular source and re-projected it to orthographic so the straight lines in a room stayed straight instead of bowing the way panoramic photographs usually do.

It also carried hotspots. Regions of a scene could be made clickable, and a click could open text or a Flash video, or jump you into the next panorama. That is a virtual tour, assembled by hand by whoever uploaded the photos, four years before Google Street View existed as something you could put inside your own house.

~ the fortnight that ended it ~

Adobe stopped distributing and updating Flash Player on 31 December 2020 and began blocking Flash content in the player from 12 January 2021. CleVR had bet both of its halves on Adobe's runtimes: the viewer was Flash, the stitcher was AIR. There was no HTML5 rewrite and nobody was going to fund one for a panorama host in its twenty-first year.

The archive shows what happened next, and it is not a clean switch-off. clevr.com served its own familiar front page, title and all, on 17 January 2021, five days after Adobe pulled the trigger. By 21 March the address was redirecting to clevr.photos, and the site ran there for eight more months looking exactly like itself, same stylesheets and same FAQ, still offering a stitcher that no longer had a runtime. The last capture of a working page is 26 October 2021. After that the domain stops answering. Nobody posted a goodbye.

~ what sits on the old address now ~

clevr.com today belongs to a Dutch and British consultancy trading as CLEVR that sells Siemens and Mendix low-code implementations. Same spelling, nothing whatsoever to do with panoramas. The photo site's own domain, clevr.photos, resolves to nothing at all. Flash was the plugin I had installed on every browser I used from about 2000 onward, through a 56k modem and then TTNet broadband, and I never once thought of it as a thing that could be withdrawn. CleVR is what that withdrawal looked like for a product that had no second layer underneath it.

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