360 Degree Photography

[KingM]

Hi, just thought I\'d post this link in case any of you haven\'t come across these before. Looks like this has been going for a good few years now, but I\'d certainly never come across shots like this before

Anyone care to shed any light on how this kind of thing is done (I can understand the ones where it pans in one direction, but how is the picture taken in this case where you can pan up and down as well ???)

Uber panning picture thingy

Check out the ones in the gallery too, there are some amazing scenes

 

[Dragon Forge Design]

I beleave this is done with something called quicktime VR. Its uses a special tripod with a 360 degree head. It rotates 360 and you take a image every so many degrees and then put them all together in the quicktime program. I had a friend do this of the NYC skyline from the top of her building as a class project in college.

Google Quicktime VR and you will find info about the equipment used and the software.

 

[Shawn R. L.]

Below and to the right of the picture is a link that might take you to the awnser.

 

[Einion]

You can assemble pictures like this from stills using stitching software like PTAssembler (which is freakin\' awesome if anybody is in the market for something to combine panoramic photos).

Einion

 

[bayrodney]

I have seen these before, on online encyclopedia\'s and programs, really cool, i have also been on something like this were you could move around too...

 

[frostdawn]

Yup, Quicktime VR is the program that stitches the images together for you, problem might be though that it was only produced for Macintosh PCs IIRC. I used it a little back in my college days. It can produce 2 varieties of panoramic images. One where it puts your point of view in the middle of a spherical room, and the image is stitched together all around your point of view. The other type of project you can create from QTVR is a panoramic image. IIRC, you can set the controls so a user can make the image rotate on the click of a directional button, or rotate the image in relation to the mouse\'s location on the screen. You can also hide links in different sections of the stitched images as well.

A nice effect if your making the \'spherical room\' and want to create the illusion of going through a door in the picture to another virtual room.

The downside though, QTVR doesn\'t take the images for you, you have to capture them, then import them into the program. So you still have to work out the photography somehow.

I think the program is a free download too, though I could be mistaken. It has been a number of years now.

 

[EricJ]

I worked in real estate marketing for years, and did a ton of real estate photography, and we would do these all the time - Virtual tours of homes are a big thing, I did 100\'s of scenes like this

Everyone thinks they are far more complicated than they are, but it\'s stupidly simple. The fact is that it\'s likely two photographs taken from a 183 degree fish eye lense stiched together. There is a special mount for the tripod which holds the camera, and will swivel the camera to lock into place looking opposite directions and displaced back slightly.

When I would do them, there was automatic solfware on the virtual tour hosting site which took these shots, basically un-distored them, stiched them together and voila, 4-5 scenes in about 20 minutes of effort including the photo taking.

Quicktime VR can definately do more complex things, but in the case of this link, it doesn\'t look so much that way

 

[EricJ]

looking closer at the original link, I think it was done with 2 fish eye shots now.

one trick to it, is that you need one shot looking directly at the light, and one shot directly away, which would reduce the glare around the edges where the 2 halves were stiched (lense flair is a bitch!). So in this shot, if you go 90 degrees from where the sun is, you can see a line in the trees just above the head of one of the people sitting there, and the opposite side, there is a unnatural fairly sudden transition in the sky of tones of blue just about opposite that.

(can you tell I\'ve done a lot of these)...this one is actually quite well done in both photography, photoshop prep and stiching to make the complex scene with lots of tones and hues hide the line as well as it is.


Edit - nope, I was wrong, there are more lines, looks like they did it the hard way

 

[frostdawn]

Yup, once you get the hang of it (easy learning curve) it\'s quick and easy to do. The hardest thing to do is taking the picture and editing it if necessary, as Eric pointed out.

 

[LavronYor]

Are there any scenes like that of say.....

The Female Figure

Now that could be artistic.

 

[Garyo]

How about this? It\'s more work than the panorama. I set up the mini or in this case mini\'s on a turntable take a series of at least 16 shots and dump them into Flash. You can take more if you like for smoother turning. The programing was a little tricky if you\'ve not done much action script, but all the info you need to find to do it I found in the Flash action script forums

Garyo