360 degrees photos. What to use?

K

Kelly Grannell

Member
I want to help my friend creating circling pictures for his house just like the sample at the link below:

sample here (then click: Streetscape, Foyer, etc)

Now I know it's a combination of no more than 8 pictures but which program should I use to do automatic circle-panorama like that? I know that's not Quicktime VR.

Thank you all beforehand.

Cheers,
Kelly
 
Wow! Just curious, how do you check that the person may be using PTViewer? Regardless, I went to the site and try to read the page and all my brain can compute is: ??? ??? ??? ??? ???
 
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Actually I barely noticed that in firefox, lower left hand side said : applet ptviewer running

For this page, it just says done.
 
Wow.. PTviewer looks pretty slick. I've often wished I had a way to give the full QTVR treatment to some images.. I lack a suitable lens, to tell the truth, but I've been thinking about trying to do something like that for a local aviation museum. The National Air and Space Museum put QTVR pictures of the inside of the cockpits of their various airplanes online, and I thought it'd be fun to do that for our local museum (which is just a startup, they have maybe three planes and a donated hanger at the moment).
PTviewer would let me do it all.. including hotspots that could link to additional information about certain items in the image.. so that, say, a viewer could click on a certain instrument and find out more information about what it is.

This is exciting, I can now propose a few more things when I give them my volunteer photographer spiel.. I could really spruce up their web site with this kind of thing.

And I'm doubly wowed by the HDR version that the referenced page links to. That's something else altogether.. you can look at the ground and the sky gets overly bright and blown out, but the ground is visible.. look up and the ground gets dark and the sky is better exposed. It's like it's simulating the real world, like you're looking through a video camera that adjusts the exposure for either the sky or the ground as you adjust the view. I've never seen that effect in a QTVR style application before.

Give me a day or two to try to figure this out and then I could assist if you're still not computing it. It looks like it could be quite simple.. but I'm not certain about the intricacies of equirectangular projection or if I'll need to feed the viewer data on the vertical viewing angle of the image.
 
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still lots of ??? ??? ??? whenever I try reading those pages. Right now I'm looking at this unit/software combo. It only requires one shot to do the entire panoramic area. www.0-360.com
 
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http://www.wowway.com/~jstodola/test.html

Well that's what I've accomplished so far. It took me ages, but really my main mistake was trying to get photoshop to do something which it doesn't seem to want to do. I know it has a good panorama stitching program and was trying to get it to stitch together a full 360 degree panorama. But it doesn't seem to understand the concept, it'll make something wider than 360 degrees, it has no obvious mechanism for automatically making a loop point. I would have had to do that manually, and that sounded like a lot of hassle.
But my camera came with a program called Photostitch that handled that task quite easily.

It doesn't look very "virtual", that's because I had a limited vertical field of view. The end result was closer to just panning the image side to side rather than doing the more complicated 3d like scaling. I can improve upon that a certain amount.. first off I can hold the camera in the portrait orientation, the test was shot landscape. I just wasn't thinking about details like that. And yes, it's too dark.. with all the shadow and direct sun I didn't bother trying to find a good exposure.

I've realized a flaw in my method though. I did this outside, in order to minimize the effects of my sloppy method, which was simply hand holding the camera and taking a series of pictures to try to cover the full 360 degrees with some overlap. But shooting the interior of a house on the other hand could require exacting precision, possibly even a specialized tripod mount.
So before I say this is a piece of cake I need to try this indoors. I need to see if things still line up when the lines of sight are much shorter and error should be more obvious.
My ultimate goal of doing the cockpit of a jet would require considerable precision, doing a room is more of an intermediate step.
 
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I didn't know Photostitch was still around!!!! I used it back in 98 for my Coronado Springs shot. (Which was before I knew really what I was doing)
 
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Yes, very impressive stuff, very high resolution. Full spherical panoramas with no visible tripod when you look straight down.. now that's a neat trick.

I took a basic photoshop course a while back, and the teacher was a pro who did QTVR type stuff. He showed us some of his work. The thing that most impressed me, and it applies to this work too (perhaps more so due to the complexities of some of the scenes) is how they handle moving objects. There's no way to avoid the fact that you have to take multiple pictures (except perhaps for that 0-360 gadget that probably couldn't match the resolution of these panoramas), so moving objects could end up half in and half out of the individual frames. I know they take multiple pictures of each angle and blend them together, but when you're shooting a scene that involves a busy street I just don't know how you can work out the possible conflicts. The fact remains that you're showing different slices of time merged together in the same image. The only way I can think of making it work out would be to edit out all moving subjects around the edges, but that'd potentially make very obvious blank spots at regular intervals.
Compared to that, calculating the nodal point and building a homemade pano head that pans around that exact point seems simple in comparison.

This was long enough ago that the teacher specifically said that he shot film and scanned it rather than using a digital camera, because he wasn't happy that digital SLR backs (special backs rather than all digital SLRs) weren't full frame and generally felt that the technology wasn't mature.

Once the temperature rises enough (preferably above freezing, photography's no fun when you can't feel your fingers) I'll go to a local park and see what I can manage. I've discovered a whole suite of freeware software that can do the sort of advanced stitching I require.. my current process has absolutely no means to edit out moving objects, but for a nature scene that shouldn't be as important so long as there's no wind.
 
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