One of my big interests is photography, and within photography I am interested in interesting ways to take and display photos, such as timelapse photography and panoramas. I have for some time wanted to make a 360 degree panorama, but as I didn’t want to put my photos on another online service I have put it off. Then last week I found this blog post that gave me exactly the code I wanted. So then on Saturday, when the sun was shining I went to the fortress in Trondheim and took a lot of pictures using a tripod. I took 5 rows of pictures, in a clockwise rotation, like this:
I tried using Hugin (and will look more into that program later) and Photoshop to stitch together all the pictures I had taken, but both took a lot of time and resources from my laptop. So I went for a program I have used in the past to make panoramas, Microsoft Image Composite Editor which automatically makes good panoramas. To make sure it would make a good spherical panorama I used the adjust tool to check the horizon in the panorama. (Click on the pictures to see them bigger.)
Here is the adjust button in Microsoft ICE.
The drop down menu (second picture) tells you which projection you’re using. The white lines are used to adjust the horizon in the panorama. I then ended up with this picture:
Using the code linked to in the blog post above (can be found here) I only had to upload the code and panorama to my hosting area and change the link in the html file to the name of my picture, and that’s it. Below is the result, which can be seen in fullscreen here. The fortress looks a little weird due to the stretching of the panorama.
I can see several applications for this kind of panorama, and will for sure make more of them. Google is a big user of this kind of panoramas, and have a page on how to make them and add them to Google maps. Their streetview pictures are made in a similar way to this. I think photospheres can be a nice addition to geotagged pictures in a map mashup, to allow people to see a place as if they were there themselves. This is not a new idea, panoramas made with Microsoft ICE can be uploaded to their Photosynth site, and can also be found on this map. But if you want a custom made solution, maybe with Openstreetmap as the background map, then this Photosphere code can be used.