Preserved Topic: AbirdsEye.com

Does anyone know how you would go about making something similar to the service offered by abirdseye.com?

a site in particular was http://www.abirdseye.com/tours/schools/caltech_cdc/

Anyone?

ask the g-man
i think he did somthing in that way before!

+-new CELL 557-+

there are two ways to publish panoramas on the web:

with a quicktimemovie or a java-applet. i did both. can show examples if you want!

no matter which one you choose you definitely need a stiched panorama image.

can i help you with something specific?

how would you go about making a stiched panoramic image? What type of hardware would be required?

And would there be any free code bases for this? I would figure you might be able to achomplish it with Javascript but that might not be as compatible as other methods.

They appear to be selling their services to create these panoramas, rather than the software itsdelf. They're using the "BeHere Totalview" technology, which looks to be similar to the iPix system, where they sell you this lens attachment for your digital camera and it then takes a round picture, after shooting straight up into a parabola. Then you run it through their software and it preps that file for a nice smooth panorama. They also have a propietary Java applet for displaying things. Pricey system, though! Lots of people (believe it or not) actually spent the $9,995 they used to charge, though now it's closer to a 1/10th of that. Still, not cheap. Personally, I'd love to have one to play with, I can stich images together but it'd be great not to have ot do that, it hardly ever work perfectly. Check out this one at http://www.ozones.com/pano/ using a demo version of a Java applet from www.go360.de - you can see where the edges merged, it ain't perfect.

Personally, I don't want all that other stuff too much, just a good Java applet for displaying things - then I could render images in Bryce, or whatever else I can imagine.

Your pal, -doc-

# for high quality and seamless panos you need a fisheye lens for your camera.
then you make 2 180x180 photos. put them together and you have your full 360 pano ready. (a full 360 pano is one that has 360° in all directions - a sphere. on the web you often see 360x90 or so.)

# for normal panos you need to make about 8 photos with a normal lens. then use a stiching software and some patience to get the pano.

# if you are goin to use rendered images like doc mentioned, check the camera settings of your rendering program.

once you have the pano-image, its your choice how you publish it (QT, Java, whatever)

JavaScript? you could control the movement of a pano in a java applet with that.

You can also create use Flash. Heres one of the best examples Ive seen -

Sydney Opera House

As for shooting them, It depends on the focal length of your lens. The Ipix "special tech" can be accomplished with an 8mm lens(available for rent for Nikon and Canon SLRs, It can be pricey to buy). I shoot most of mine with the equivelant of a 24mm lens(I use a Nikon D-1 with an 17-35mm, because its it a digital camera the effective lens length is about 1.4 to 1.5 times the real length of the lens- so about a 24mm). I could use the lens at 17mm but im to lazy to scan all those film frames.


Get a tripod, and rotate the head 360-degrees taking pictures all the way around. If you dont have one just rotate your body.I usually take about 10 to 12 shots but the numbers dont matter as much as making sure you have enough overlap. Try to keep people, poles, or signs off the edges because you'll have a hell of a time stiching them. Also watch for moving objects such as cars or people. You dont want them to appear in multiple frames(At work, We once had an intern shoot a VR from the pitchers mound at a baseball game. As the umpires walked out she rotated the camera. she had about 15 umps in the VR.)

An important thing to remember if you have automatic exposure on your camera is to lock the exposure so you get an even exposure all the way around. Look at your camera for an AE lock.

After that get the photos into some sort of stitcher(as the others have said). I usually find that the panorama requires some touch-up work in PS afterwords.

Here's one of my harder to shoot VRs(forgive me its old)-
http://cjonline.com/stories/051598/mamba.shtml

I had to ride this cannon ride up to the top seat by seat until I had 360-degrees, it scared the crap out o me(I hate heights).

That was a bit long-winded but I hope it helps.

-tiki, cell 478

good work there tikigod!

are you sure the flash one doesnt use some quicktime trick inside?


here are 2 i made a while ago from screenshots of return to castle wolfenstein.
i was kinda in a hurry so they are very low quality.
http://www.wapod.com/~grumble/misc/PANORAMA1.mov
http://www.wapod.com/~grumble/misc/PANORAMA2.mov

Those are cool. Was there a reason you made them from Castle Wolfenstien?

The look great to me the lower res doesnt hurt them at all.

In the Sydney Operahouse, the low res VRs are all flash, the High res ones use quicktime.

-tiki, cell 478

Didn't bugs do something similary for his bryce panoramas using DHTMl a while back? It didn't gistort the edges of the image but it still worked quite well.

But yah, you can do it with a normal cammera and a normal lense. Yet I'd go as far to say a tripod is a must. The key angle of rotation from image to image works out to be around 15° for your standard 8mm lense. Setting a standard angle goes a long way when it comes to stitching them togther. I've never actually done one from start to finish it before but my girlfriend has done several for multimedia CD-ROM's which I've taken the photo's for.

thanks, i made them for a course here at the uni. and due to lazyness of making real photos i took screenshots of that game.
in the end we had to produce an interactive story with panos, hotspots, and QTVR objects. was fun after all!

infact i think they are even cubic panoramas. a new feature of Quicktime 5. but im not sure anymore.

i also made some with real photos and they use a java-applet for display, but i dont find them anymore, so i also cant put them on the web.