360° Panoramic Virtual Reality Images

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The above photograph is a screen-capture from a 360° Panoramic Virtual Reality Image from http://www.360pano.eu website. Click on the image and enjoy the experience of a panorama view by panning the image with mouse pointer.

By definition “panorama” means an unbroken view of an entire surrounding area which is a picture or a series of pictures representing a continuous scene. This often exhibited a part at a time by being unrolled and passed before the spectator.

Panorama also defined as any wide view of a physical space. It has also come to refer to a wide-angle representation of such a view whether in painting, drawing, photograph, film/video or a three dimensional model.

Panoramic photography is a most common method for creating wide views. Digital photography of this age greatly simplified photo assembling or photo stitching process. Such stitched images can even converted into virual reality (VR) models using Apple’s Quicktime VR or with JAVA. A rotating line camera such as Panoscan or a similar device allows the capture of very high resolution panoramic images and eliminates the need for image stitching.

Panoramic 360° images can be constructed for specially designed display spaces -typically at theme parks, World fairs and other important places or events.

Scott Haefner has created another set of Ground based 360° panoramas and Kite aerial photographs of 360° panoramas with the help of specially designed equipments. The details and images are available at http://www.scotthaefner.com.

In Haefner’s model, only two images are used to create the panorama. One looking straight down from the kite using a simple rig, and a second looking straight up from the ground. Both images are shot with a circular fisheye lens that has a 180° view (Nikon FC-E9). You can think of it as if each image contains a “hemisphere” of information: the image from the kite is the southern hemisphere, and the image from the ground is the northern hemisphere. When you rotate around in the image, you are viewing it from the center of a sphere that you’re inside of. The image is projected onto the walls of the sphere; It’s like being at the center of a bubble, looking around.

First, editing has been done with the two initial images, fixing color balance, contrast, etc.


Photo taken from the kite	Photo taken from the ground

The next step is to “unwrap” the circular images into rectangular images. For this, PTMac, a very nice front-end to the excellent Panorama Tools (PanoTools) software were used.

Finally, these two images brought into Adobe Photoshop CS and combined them, using layers. The sky shot has been stretched vertically so that any visible ground features can be hidden behind the ground shot in the composite image. A layer mask is created to make the seam between the two images as discreet as possible.