VR Panoramas
I was getting paid to browse photography sites yesterday at work and came across this super cool page full of Quicktime VR movies taken at some photo expo. I thought those must have been taken with some wacky equipment, and decided to see how they were made. I was surprised to discover that making them is fairly simple, if involved, and decided to try to make my own.
Creating a VR panorama basically involves shooting 360 degrees of an area, feeding the photos to a program that can figure out how to stitch them all together into one file, then feeding the resulting panorama to a program that converts it to an interactive Quicktime movie. If I had my fisheye, I think I could shoot every angle of a room in 3 or 4 photos, making this process much simpler. However, my fisheye is still on backorder, and Adorama can’t tell me when they’ll be getting more in. So I had to shoot about 60 photos on my 18mm to cover every angle of a room. I set up my tripod in the middle of my dad’s fort, took a picture, turned a few degrees, took a picture, repeat, repeat.
I then imported 60 RAW files into Lightroom, exported them as JPGs, and fed them to some stitching software, but it couldn’t figure them out. I was getting horrible blurry anomalies in my panoramas. I decided instead to shoot my dining room, and got marginally better results. THEN I read the instructions for the program, and learned how to use it. I retried the photos of my dad’s fort and the program stitched them together quite well. It’s not perfect (that oak toolbox is specifically very messed up), but it works for the most part.
You’ll need Quicktime to view this. Quicktime Alternative is how I roll. Move around the VR by clicking and dragging the mouse, shift and CTRL (or command on a Mac, I think) zoom in and out, respectively.
I wasn’t going to at first, because I don’t think it’s very cool to advertise, online, how dirty your house is, but here is the panorama of my dining room. This is much more messed up than the fort; I have some random wormholes and different types of galactic portals and stuff, and the stairs leave this dimension at one point, only to return a couple inches later. It’s a little weird.
March 14th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
really cola!