This site has a virtual tour of their facilities (just click on City Hall or Post Office to see). My company actually just finished building a new location for them and I want our web site to have some panaramic type views of the stuff we've done. Does anyone know of any software (free?) that would let me build something like this that will work in most browsers? I've seen it before where you take multiple images of a room, rotating 20 degrees or so between pics and then "connect the points" in software, but that was for panaramic stills, not 360 degree "movies" like this...

Help?

The best one is Panorama Tools. I'm not sure where the latest version is but this will get you going:

http://www.google.com/search?q=ptviewer

To do 360 degree views you need a fisheye lens and a rotaty thing for your tripod. I think you can get these for most higher-end cameras - the tripod bit can be home-made if necessary but needs to be precise for really good images.

Gareth

To do 360 degree views you need a fisheye lens and a rotaty thing for your tripod

Nah, I do panoramas all the time with my Canon camera. No tripod, no fisheye lens. The stitching software came with the camera. I don't recall if the software is freely downloadable from Canon's site or not.

I know that it's better with a tripod and with a special lens, but I think the original question specifically asked for "free".

Nope, I don't see it at the Canon site. Too bad, since I tried some of the freeware photo stitchers and I didn't like them as much as the one that came with the camera.

Anyway, to answer SE's question more directly:

Yes, you can do the trick where you take a picture, rotate the camera, take another picture, etc., and it's possible to stitch the results into a 360-degree "VR" file or just a really wide regular JPG file, your choice. Once you've got the pictures, the rest is just how you choose to save the final file format.

There's two things you need to worry about:

1. Getting the pictures right. The Canon camera I've got has a "stitch assist" mode where I can actually see the prior photo lined up on the LCD so that I know how much to overlap the next photo. It's hard to describe, but really nifty when you see it in action. It would be possible to do this without the stitch-assist, but it would require a lot more trial and error and would mean a lot more fiddling with the photos in the PC afterwards. Also, if your camera aims up or down a little bit, or if you rotate it just a little bit, then the whole procedure gets thrown off by the amount of rotation or angle. Too much rotation or angle and the images will be too messed up to stitch. So that's why a tripod is useful. It's not required, but it makes it a lot easier.

2. Choosing how to put the 360-VR images on the web site. There isn't a standard format for this, and it always requires third party viewer software. Every time I've seen a site do this, it's been a different format. Some of them are Java applets, others are ActiveX controls which put spyware on your hard disk, others require you to download a player and install it yourself. Then there's whatever limitation of the software that you're stitching with. Mine ouputs only QuickTime VR, I think.

But other than that, yeah, you can do it for free.

I watched a Screen Savers special on Photoshop tricks, and they were showing off the new photo stich function in Photoshop CS

The TechTV article from the special is here.

Of course, it's not like Photoshop is cheap, let alone free!

I looked at that TechTV article, and it assumes you're using a flatbed scanner and therefore all the images have edges that properly match. Unfortunately, it doesn't apply here.

When you're doing photos, the edges of each image need to be stretched and distorted so that they match up. The more variation in the rotation and angle of each photo, the more each image needs to be distorted. That was something I liked about the Canon software, it did a really good job of handling this as well as giving you control over the matching points.

Can't compare it to the photoshop CS feature since I don't have it....

Video Orbits is insanely good at stitching, but it won't do the final thing of converting it into Quicktime VR. Can the VR tool import panoramas as images, and just do the final Quicktimisation?

Peter

That link you gave, Peter, is a good one because it illustrates why you need to be able to distort the images to get them to stitch properly. The artist who made those was deliberately emphasizing this distortion for artistic effect, but you can see how even a carefully-composed set of images would need at least some distortion.

It's been a while since I played with Panos in Photoshop. I've got CS and have seen the new menu items, but haven't used them yet. www.ptgui.com has links to the free plugins and a commercial (GUI) interface product. http://www.ptgui.com/panotools.html is a link to mirrors of Helmut Dersch's orginal site.

When I don't use my 'stitch-assist' on my Canon S35 (ie when using film or my 10D) it's best to use a tripod with a geared head. Photos should overlap at least 1/4 with the adjoining photos and it's best to keep your 'pan' horizontal as possible (this is where a tripod with a level comes in handy). Also, the better the camera's lens the better you panorama will be. Cheaper/smaller lenses have more pronounced brightness fall-offs towards the outside edges. When you stitch these become dark bands where the photos overlap, and they're difficult to edit out.

HTH.

-Zeke

Cheaper/smaller lenses have more pronounced brightness fall-offs towards the outside edges. When you stitch these become dark bands where the photos overlap, and they're difficult to edit out.

Yep. In the reviews at www.dpreview.com , this brightess falloff is called "Vignetting", and will vary from camera to camera. I can see it very clearly in some of the panoramas I've taken, not so much in others. Depends on the lighting of the subject area.

Wow, you guys really gave me some great info to look into! I got lucky and found a buddy who had a Canon camera he let me borrow with the special panarama mode on it. That thing rocks! I sat at his computer and used the PhotoStitch software to merge the images in about 5 min. Great, simple program!

This is what I've been working on for the last 3 months. (Click on "Virtual Tour" under Exchange City.) This part of the site isn't finished yet, so I appologize for the half-done look of it. I had to share what it could do though!

PS - Tony, that image you linked to of the Autobahn is amazing!

PS - Tony, that image you linked to of the Autobahn is amazing!

Thanks! But it was taken from a narrow road miles from the Autobahn. I think you meant to say "image of Neuschwanstein"....

I sat at his computer and used the PhotoStitch software to merge the images in about 5 min.

Isn't that PhotoStitch software a kick? The only good piece of software included with that camera...

The only thing about that program is I havn't found out yet how to reduce the size of the output file. I'm near 2MB and that's pretty big even for broadband users.

Brad, am I the only one tha has issues with the quicktime not drawing properly? I get maybe 10% on the left that works fine, the rest is the brown background color. You can still rotate around and look at the entire scene, it's just that I feel like I'm looking through an arrow slit.

Hm... it's a large file, so it needs time to load. Are you on dial up? The link I posted isn't public yet, so I'd like to get any bugs worked out.

No, I'm on broadband. If I had to use dialup I wouldn't bother. Anyway, I'm running Netscape 7.1 with quicktime plugin 6.1c. I'll try it from IE and see if it works there.

OK, it works fine with IE. Here's what I get when I try it in Netscape.




Keep in mind that the entire image works, It's just that only that little sliver works. Nothing else changes. I have used other panoramic sites with no problem, so I dunno what the issue is.

Well, the source says

<embed SRC="exchangecity.mov" WIDTH="40" HEIGHT="312" AUTOPLAY="true"
CONTROLLER="true" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/">

, so it seems Netscape is doing exactly what it's told, while IE is ignoring it (and Safari here too).

Oopsie! Looks like a little typo on my part, I entered that stuff by hand. I don't think that IE is ignoring it, it is looking at it's own code a few lines up that correctly had width as 400.

Thanks guys!