Friday, January 9, 2009

Spherical Panoramas

If you’re a visual person, and you haven’t yet experienced a spherical panorama, you’re in for a treat. It's also called Quicktime VR or QTVR.

A spherical panorama is a photographic representation of the full 360-degree field of vision. Using a special camera apparatus and a photo-stitching technique, an array of photos taken from a single point of observation are seamlessly mapped across the surface of a sphere or cube surrounding the viewer.


The photo above is really just a flattened cylindrical panorama, because it's just as hard to convey a spherical panorama in one illustration as it is to show a map of the globe on a flat piece of paper.

Using a special plugin from QuickTime (resident on a Mac, and downloadable for other computers), you can control your direction of view, and in some cases, you can zoom closer to any given region of the picture.
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A good place to start is the website “spherical panoramas” Link.
You can also find various images on “Fullscreen Quicktime Virtual Reality” Link.
Quicktime site: link.

6 comments:

  1. Is this the technology that Google Maps is using to show what street scapes look like?

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  2. yes this technology was really cool.....five years ago, HAHA! where have you been bro? HAHA!

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  3. yes i think this is the same technology used in street scapes on google maps,

    real estate agents also use this technology to give virtual tours of a home over the internet, pertty cool.

    i would love to see a virtual tour of your studio james! that would be awsome!

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  4. Super-Wu: Oops, I guess I'm behind the times! Most of the information in this blog is more than 150 years old, so if something is 5 years old, it's hot off the press, as far as I'm concerned.

    Not sure if I'm ready for a spherical panorama of my studio until I get around to cleaning it up.

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  5. There is a low-tech alternative to this kind of panorama: a collage with many photos, David Hockney-style. I love the results of these compositions, with multiple vantage points, overlaps and empty areas and all.
    I'm even more technology - outdated than James...

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  6. Great stuff!
    Keep posting!!!
    Thanjks!!!!

    Regards,
    panoramic photo stitching

    ReplyDelete

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