Creating a full 360-degree Panorama

I'm playing around with new twist on a long-time hobby and obsession of mine - the stitching together of multiple photographs to create massive panorama images. With the right tools and some patience once can create a panorama that is a full 360-degree "spherical" image.

The panorama looks a little weird when viewed as a flattened rectangle

Photos are shot from a single point in every possible direction including straight up and down. Special software locates the adjacent images and overlaps and stitches it all together into one giant image. This image is like the map image of the world that gets glued onto the outside of a globe - only this image goes on the inside of the globe and one views it from the very center.


There are a number of tricks and helpful tools - both hardware and software as well as an enthusiastic community willing to share hints and images.

Panosaurus

One of the key pieces of hardware (besides a camera) is a tripod attachment that allows the camera to be positioned so the lens center and focal point can be the axis around which the camera rotates rather than the traditional center of the camera body where the tripod mount happens to be. I'm using a head built by an enthusiast called the Panosaurus. See the site http://gregwired.com/pano/pano.htm for details and a lot of links about creating and using spherical panoramas.

Many different software options exist to help you stitch together the images and prepare them for display. I am using a commercial solution called Autopano by a company called, Kolor. It is based on another commercial system called krpano. However one can also achieve the same results using completely free open-source software like GIMP and Hugin - see this site for instructions.

I'm using the Kolor product thanks to a kind mini-grant from my work - the panorama creation is just the beginning. I will be teaching myself to use Kolor's Panotour Pro which is an authoring tool that allows one to turn one or a whole series of panoramas into a virtual tour complete with hotspots, text and image overlays and links as well as embedded audio and video. My next post will cover the creation of one of these tours - a prototype of the inside of a museum gallery.