Apple sold one millionth iPhone 3G on Sunday, just three days after its launch on Friday, July 11. “iPhone 3G had a stunning opening weekend,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “It took 74 days to sell the first one million original iPhones, so the new iPhone 3G is clearly off to a great start around the world.”

A big improvement on its original model, the iPhone G3 offers the chance to load exciting application to use. And one of these is - the coolest one! - PangeaVR, which gives to the iPhoners the chance to explore VRs on the iPhone Screen.

PangeaVR is a free viewer that uses OpenGL to display full screen panoramas at very high performances on iPhones; the latest development by Pangea software, a company founded back in 1987 by Brian Greenstone. The award-winning company creates since then original software for Mac and its family, with titles which have made history, such as Bugdom, Nanosaur and Mighty Mike. Pangea Software Inc. got the "Best iPhone Game" Award at Apple's WWDC '08, for its game Enigmo.

Photographers can upload images portfolio on the site and the iPhoners can navigate through them.

VRWay contributed with a selected portfolio named "360 Arounder Cityscapes" of the landmarks of Arounder, so that - wherever the iPhoner is - he can discover where history was made; be enchanted by sceneries and Unesco World Heritage sites; enter into museums; walk through parks and city's centers and meditate within the walls of ancient cathedrals.
And Panogames's portfolio named "PanoGames - Next Gen Screenshots" allows you to explore computer game panoramas of 28 AAA titles, totalizing 87 panos.

We had an interesting conversation with Brian Greenstone:

Please tell us something more about Brian, the man behind pangeasoft?
My main purpose in life seems to me to make video games, and that's primarily what Pangea software does. The VR stuff started as a hobby several years ago, and now I do some field work on the side along with churning out the occasional VR app like PangeaVR. My degree is actually in Radio-TV-Film production which probably explains my interest in VR photography, but somehow I landed in the video game world.

You are creating mac games since ever, could you tell us more about the most successful titles you created (before the ipod and iphone touch)?
The original Nanosaur and Bugdom games were our most successful ones by far. Those games were huge hits back in the day (8-9 years ago), but my favorite game was Otto Matic. I think that's my best work ever.

Nanosaur

Bugdom

Which ones are having the greatest success on iphone and ipod?
Enigmo seems to be holding on in the Top rankings. It had been wavering around the #2 and #3 spot for a while, but now it has dropped to #4. Cro-Mag Rally is our other game, and it started off well, but there is a lot of competition in the 3D driving game space, so it has dropped to #11. Still, a very good ranking considering there are 500+ apps on iTunes.

Cro-Mag Rally

Can you share some stats about the pangeavr usage?
I don't know how many times it has been downloaded, but every time someone launches the app it reads the database XML file off of our web site, and I can see how many times that file has been loaded from our web stats. At last count it was over 90,000 times! Most people with their portfolios on there have reported (as of Monday) around 1,200 hits on their sites, each. That's pretty amazing! So, it appears to be getting the VR community some good exposure (no pun intended).

What can we expect in version 1.1 which has just been released?
Version 1.1 is really nice! It adds thumbnail preview support, camera settings, and GPS coordinate support that integrates with the Maps app on the iPhone.

I heard that there will be space for 500 galleries, do you plan adding some more levels,to access the final vr's, I mean today we have only gallery/vrname?
I never expected this much interest in the app, so it just wasn't designed to handle so many portfolios. 1.1 will support up to 500, but even now with the 50 that are in 1.0 it is a little hard to navigate. I may just end up cutting people off to keep it manageable. I thought about pruning some of the less interesting portfolios, but honestly, they're almost all interesting, so I can't really find much to prune. I guess it'll just be first-come first-served until I decide to not add any more.

What are the future developments you are working on?
Right now I'm working on a major update to Enigmo which will allow the user to download additional game files that they can create with the Mac/PC version of the game. Beyond that, I'm just waiting to see how these games sell before starting the next one.

Enigmo

What professional services do you offer?
Do both VR training and actual production work. I teach a 4-week class at the University of Texas on VR Photography.

Links:
PangeaVR
Pangeasoft.net
BrianGreenstone.com