STEREO PANOGRAPHY How I make 360 degree stereoscopic photos Thomas K Sharpless Philadelphia, PA
[email protected] WHY SPHERICAL PHOTOGRAPHY? ● Omnidirectional view of a place and time ● Very high resolution possible ● Immersive experience possible WHAT IS A SPHERICAL PHOTO? ● A 360 x 180 degree image ● Processed and stored in a flat format such as equirectangular or cube map. ● Viewed piecewise on a screen using panorama player software with interactive pan and zoom. ● When viewed in a virtual reality headset, you feel that you are inside the picture. SPHERICAL IMAGE FORMATS TOP: 360x180 DEGREE EQUIRECTANGULAR MAP BOTTOM:SIX 90x90 DEGREE CUBE FACES VIEW SPHERICAL PHOTOS ON THE WEB The bathroom panorama, on 360Cities.net Are You Asleep In There? -- Ed Wilcox Same room, different artist, on Roundme.com Now And At The Hour Of Our Death -- Ashley Carrega HOW TO MAKE A SPHERICAL PHOTO ● Use a fish-eye or ultra-wide lens ● Rotate the camera around lens pupil while taking enough photos to cover the sphere ● Use stitching software to combine the photos into a seamless spherical image A PRO PANORAMIC CAMERA SONY A7r FULL FRAME MIRRORLESS CAMERA SIGMA 15 MM 160 DEGREE FISH-EYE LENS A COMPACT PANORAMIC CAMERA SONY ALPHA, SAMYANG 8mm/2.8 160 DEG. FISH-EYE PANORAMIC TRIPOD HEAD NODAL NINJA NN6 WITH MULTI-STOP ROTATOR PANORAMA BUILDING SOFTWARE ESSENTIAL ● PTGui pro ($$) or Hugin (free) ● Adobe Photoshop ($$$) or GIMP (free) VERY USEFUL ● Adobe Lightroom ($$) ● Pano2VR pro ($$) ● Image Magick (free) ESSENTIAL FOR 3D ● sView stereo panorama player (free) ● PT3D stereo stitching helper ($) OMNIDIRECTIONAL STEREO Combines two 19th century innovations: panoramic photos + stereoscopic photos Depends on 21st century digital technology Best viewed on a computer-driven stereopticon, that is, a virtual reality headset OMNISTEREO THEORY An omnistereo photo is a stereo pair of slit-scan panoramas.