PanoTools:
Re: virtual tours, the future?
Yuval Levy 2005-Feb-06 14:39:06
nbrinks (sent by Nabble.com) wrote:
> Anyone else have any other ideas on how this was done?
panos: like you said, not a one-shot. i guess these specific images are made with one of those webcams that look like a cube with little lenses on all sides. for the nadir they might have taken the input from contiguous images and warped/stitched them to cover it.
they do not need high resolution - it is moving. they have to accomodate for bandwidth/memory limitation because there is a huge quantity of panos that can not fit in RAM, so it has to be streamed.
the viewer i have seen is shockwave based, like Aldo's SPi-V - maybe he knows something more about it? I wonder how much code they have in common?
from what i can see, i guess they can not yet stream properly (e.g. Google Earth). They seem to download a full pano at a time, as opposed to Fulvio's .ptv format (for which there is now support in SPi-V) that downloads first those tiles of a pano that are in the viewer's field of view and then, subsequently, the nearby tiles (which in this case would mean not just tiles on the same panorama, but tiles in the next couple of them.
It seems to be a grid or a labiryinth of some sort, with a pano at every feet. Extremely intensive, which shows in their pricelist.
It is not yet the holy grail of scanning completely a 3D environment and represent it with vectors and textures and as somebody said before, could be done with ptviewer, though java's memory limitations stand in the way. moving from one pano to the next is only a matter of calculating which pano is the next one and move to it with the proper pan angle.
Summarizing, a nice tool on the very high end ($$$) of virtual visits, with acceptable compromises on image quality (we still watch 512-lines TV, even though modern digicams have 2000+ lines).
Yuv
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