Panoramas in 360 degrees

John Fowler

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Jan 17, 2012
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I got a new toy, a Sunex 5.6 mm lens that has a 185 degree field of view on my Nikon D7000 (APS-C sensor). You can take a full spherical panorama with just two shots, although three shots makes it easier to stitch. You can see a test result at my web site. Also I posted a 360 degree but not quite 180 degrees vertical pano that I made at the Wave in 2009. This was made using my Nikon 18-200 at 18 mm and composed of 40 individual shots. You can see that the Wave pano is quite a bit sharper and has less chromatic aberration. The downside of course is having to take all those exposures and hoping that nothing moves (clouds included) during the minute or so that this takes. So the Sunex is much more convenient, but no lens is going to give the quality from three exposures that you can get from a longer lens covering the same area in 40 exposures.

Anyway, to see these panos, go to my web site:

http://www.lumenetic.com

Then click on "Virtual Reality" in the header, and then click on "The Wave" or "Sandia Stone Cabin". You can zoom and pan with your mouse. Also full-screen by clicking on the square with arrows in the upper right corner.

If you have a slow connection, a blurred version will appear at first, which will gradually be refined on the screen.

Here's an image from the Sunex:

_DSC9955.jpg
 
Checked out your 360s on your site. Very nice. Does PTGui take care of the turning them into the flash deal for your web site or did you have to run finished product through another software?
 
Checked out your 360s on your site. Very nice. Does PTGui take care of the turning them into the flash deal for your web site or did you have to run finished product through another software?
PTGui Pro makes the .htm file, the .swf file, the .js file, and 18 .jpg files which together you can upload directly to a web site and just call it by linking to the .htm file. Based on your browser capability, it sends flash, quicktime, or html5. So it's pretty easy to do. the hard part can be in the stitching, which PTGui usually gets right but sometimes you have to manually add control points, and in the removal of your shadow and the tripod's if you are a perfectionist.
 
I usedta have a full-immersive stereo VR system with head tracker so you could actually walk through a scene. Some folks didn't like the fact that their visual field told them something was happening that their muscles said couldn't possibly be correct.
 

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