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Panoramas General Considerations | Cylindrical | Spherical | Cubic Rectilinear | Multimedia Panos Spherical Panoramas Spherical panos are built by mathematically projecting an environment's photo- graphic information onto the inside of an imaginary sphere that surrounds the environment. They offer up to a full 360 degree by 360 degree record of the scene in both horizontal and vertical directions. This view is analogous to what a viewer would see standing on a rotating platform with a remote control in hand that could turn the platform to the left and right as desired. The viewer could look from straight up to straight down at any point in the rotation. This completely encompassing field of view can capture an image of the whole environment. This is helpful when the scene contains important information in the foreground and/or directly overhead. Spherical panos can be constructed in several ways: Spherical panos can be built by stitching together multiple rows of photographs taken as the camera rotates around its viewpoint. Each row is photographed with the camera pitched (tilted) at a different angle so that the entire vertical field of view is documented. Spherical panos can be created from photographs of reflective spheres. Spherical panos can be captured by special digital panoramic scanning cameras equipped with fisheye lenses that are designed to rotate and capture, a vertical line of pixels at a time, the entire spherical environment in a single digital image. This image is automatically output as a spherical pano. These cameras produce high quality spherical panos very quickly but can be very expensive, currently costing between $6,000 to $50,000 each. Spherical panoramas can also be generated by the reprojection of a cubic pano into a spherical format. When spherical panos are captured using high dynamic range techniques (HDR), a method that attempts to accurately capture true light intensity from very bright to very dark, these panos can be used to realistically illuminate virtual 3D worlds. |
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