How to embed an interactive QTVR panorama clip into my blog??

[harsh.kataruka]

Hi,

I've created an interactive QTVR file for my panorama but am unable to embed it to my blog.
When i try to upload it to flickr, the orientation gets warped and even losing out on the interactivity..

Any help would be much appreciated.

Also, visit my blog at delhithroughmylens.blogspot.com



Cheers,

Harsh

[inkista]

Pageot can help create the embed tag for QTVRs. Flickr can't handle a QTVR .mov file. You need to upload it as a still image, either the full pano, or an equirectangular. You can then use a few different tools to display it interactively through Flash. The group discussions you want to look at are for the Equirectangular group. The two tools I know of are Seb Przd's flash viewer, and Aldo's SPi-V viewer.

[harsh.kataruka]

Hi Inkista,

thanks for your reply.

PageOT is a super s/w.. am able to run the pano on my stand-aloe machine. is there any way for me to upload a quicktime movie ( some free server maybe ) to which i can then link pageOT code to?

[inkista]

If you have a server site of your own that lets you ftp, yeah, it's just like any other file. In terms of free services that do the QTVR thing, though, I don't know. I've been happy enough with the Flickr viewers that I just pop equirectangulars up on Flickr.

[harsh.kataruka]

Originally Posted by inkista

If you have a server site of your own that lets you ftp, yeah, it's just like any other file. In terms of free services that do the QTVR thing, though, I don't know. I've been happy enough with the Flickr viewers that I just pop equirectangulars up on Flickr.

Forgive me for being a noob... but what's an equirectangular? and how do u create a panorama as one?

I used autodesk's stitcher unlimited which only gives me option of either creating a QTVR file or IVP player file..

[inkista]

Equirectangulars are a format used for representing full spherical panos. They're also known as cubics or 360°x180° panos. In essence, you can look straight up and down as well as all around. The kind of pano that has 360° coverage in yaw, but doesn't have a "top" or "bottom" is usually known as a "cylindrical", as the flat plane of the pano image wraps around like a cylinder in space.

An equirectangular remaps a sphere to a flat plane by simply using the longitude as the x-coordinate, and the latitude as the y-coordinate. You end up with a 2x1 rectangle that represents a sphere:



To get this kind of coverage, it's more convenient to use very wide-angle lenses. Most people who shoot these types of panos use circular fisheye lenses, which can give you a 180° field of view, so you can cover an entire sphere with only four images handheld. Or, if image quality is a priority, diagonal fisheyes or ultrawides that can cover the sphere in 8-20 shots. Here's an example of the member shots I made for a pano I took in the doorway of a used bookstore with my Canon XT and the Sigma 8mm circular fisheye:



I used a tripod and Nodal Ninja 2 panohead to minimize parallax error, and rotated the six portrait shots at 60° intervals. Then took the zenith (straight up) and a handheld nadir (straight down) shot without the tripod and panohead for patching.

I stitched the six rotated shots and zenith shot in PTMac since I'm on a mac (it is not, however, compatible with Snow Leopard, so I'd actually recommend looking at PTGui or Hugin instead if you want to get into this). And formed an equirectangular, with the tripod in the bottom of the shot. I then remapped the equirectangular out to six cube faces with CubicConverter (Pano2VR can do the same thing on all platforms), and patched the missing "hole" in the nadir with the handheld shot using layers and warping. In the end I had this:



This can then be used to create a QTVR Cubic, or uploaded to Flickr and viewed through the Spi-V player. the Spi-V viewer can recognize and handle cylindrical and equirectangular panos and display them accordingly.

I can also remap the sphere another way (in this case, using a "mirrorball" remapping via Flexify), and get a "little planet" image out of it.

[harsh.kataruka]

Wow,

that was informative.. i think though, i'm a long way away from doing this yet.. I use a canon super zoom P&S..

Thanks a lot for your explanation and the illustration though.. i'll try to google if fish-eye type images can be shot with my camera.

Cheers,

Harsh

[inkista]

Yeah this is an extreme form of panostitching. And I got so fascinated with it, it's why I ended up switching from a P&S to a dSLR--so I could get a fisheye and do this kind of stuff.

The other extreme end of panostitching are the gigapixel/gigapan guys. We spherical shooters are about coverage. They're about resolution. It's the whole Google Earth thing; I wanna zoom in more! Max Lyons's webiste is a good introduction to that kind of pano stitching, just as Hans Nyberg's panoramas.dk site was the nexus of QTVR cubic activity.

The SX10 can still get you pretty far down this road, though. First you do single-rows. Then you do single-rows in portrait mode. Then you do multiple rows...