360 degree photo

Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy.
This forum is not for asking programming related questions.

Moderator: General Moderators

Post Reply
Howard547
Forum Newbie
Posts: 13
Joined: Fri Jul 19, 2002 11:58 am

360 degree photo

Post by Howard547 »

I design realestate websites, and I was thinking that it would be a good idea to have 360 degree video things which will let the user look around the room.

example:
http://www.vrguild.net/c/stnd.pl?U=0307192132176524
User avatar
JAM
DevNet Resident
Posts: 2101
Joined: Fri Aug 08, 2003 6:53 pm
Location: Sweden
Contact:

Post by JAM »

Your right.
Unipus
Forum Contributor
Posts: 409
Joined: Tue Aug 26, 2003 2:06 pm
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Post by Unipus »

Sure. Go for it. :P

Best ones you'll find are at http://www.panoramas.dk

Look in the "full screen archive" on the right side of the page.
Howard547
Forum Newbie
Posts: 13
Joined: Fri Jul 19, 2002 11:58 am

How do I get a 360 degree photo

Post by Howard547 »

I forgot to ask my question above. How do I take the 360 degree photo?
qads
DevNet Resident
Posts: 1199
Joined: Tue Apr 23, 2002 10:02 am
Location: Brisbane

Post by qads »

u just take 4 photos i guess
User avatar
trollll
Forum Contributor
Posts: 181
Joined: Tue Jun 10, 2003 11:56 pm
Location: Round Rock, TX
Contact:

Post by trollll »

Officially, you have a special camera mounted on a tripod that rotates on a timed motor. Unofficially, you can fake it with a regular dv, load the optimized movie into flash and script it. I've seen it done the real way (oh, those dot-com days!) and I've mickey-moused it myself for apartment shots. You could probably find a few places online close by to get quotes from (depending on your location), and then decide if the extra quality seems worth it as supposed to the extra time to do it yourself.

Actually, I think you could even find applications online to help you get the video to line up just right.

As for taking four photos, that would only work with a couple days spent in photoshop because of the lighting and angle differences (tried that first...). You'd need to have subtle gradient masks to cover the light differences and then distort the edges quite a bit to make it seem like a continual shot.
User avatar
JayBird
Admin
Posts: 4524
Joined: Wed Aug 13, 2003 7:02 am
Location: York, UK
Contact:

Post by JayBird »

Actually, for better results, you need at least 8 photos, because you need the pistures to overlap, which you can't do with 4 pictures.

Get any digital camera and set it up on a tri-pod. You'll need a tri-pod where you can set the camera to rotate excatly a certain number of degrees after each photo.

Once all your shots are taken, i use Quicktime VR Authoring Studio - only available for Mac but is definatley the best!

Import all your pictures in the correct sequence, then you can actually watch the software normalize the lighting, "stitch" the photos together automatically and warp the images onto the inside of a sphere. It gets it about 95% right most of the time, but you can manually tweak the position of each segment if neccessary.

Thats it! You can then ad hotspots in your scene for people to click on and take them to a webpage, play a sound etc.

For the software, look here http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtvr/authoringstudio/

Mark
User avatar
phice
Moderator
Posts: 1416
Joined: Sat Apr 20, 2002 3:14 pm
Location: Dallas, TX
Contact:

Post by phice »

That's not the way we did it.

You just set up a camera on a tripod, take a picture every 30* or so, until you get around to the other side. Take a "stitching" software to stitch the photos together, and you've got yourself a 360* photo.
Image Image
User avatar
mr_griff
Forum Commoner
Posts: 64
Joined: Tue Sep 17, 2002 11:11 am
Location: Bozeman, Montana

Post by mr_griff »

Does anyone know of an open source solution for making 360 degree photos?
Unipus
Forum Contributor
Posts: 409
Joined: Tue Aug 26, 2003 2:06 pm
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Post by Unipus »

Well, you can do it manually in Photoshop or the like... sort of a pain in the ass, though.
Once all your shots are taken, i use Quicktime VR Authoring Studio - only available for Mac but is definatley the best!
I think you'd probably find Realviz Stitcher to be superior. Although, not free - or cheap.
Post Reply