Equirectangular and cubic panoramas

This post is here to demonstrate the difference between two different ways how full spherical panoramas can be saved.

Most panoramas on panoye are equirectangular:

On equirectangular panoramas some lines are distorted and some aren't. Horizontal lines at the center are straight and so are all vertical lines. All other lines are more or less distorted. Lines closer to the top or bottom are more distorted than those near the center.

That's why even non-spherical panoramas with wider visible field (i.e. bigger height compared to width) sometimes seem very distorted.

There is no way to show the entire panorama (as a single photography) with all straight lines - straight. But...Here comes the cubic perspective:





As you can see - with cubic perspective:

• All lines are straight,
  
  
• The panorama is showed with 6 different square photos. They are called "cubefaces" (because they can be arranged to make a perfect 3D cube).

Cubic perspective is better suited for fullscreen panoramic players but there is no easy way to make them. For example, I used 4 different apps for the examples above: autostitch, Perl/erect2cubic command-line tool, GIMP and hugin.

Anybody interested in a quick tutorial on how to make cubic panoramas?

Personal RSS feed

In the last few weeks I became a big fan of a service called FriendFeed. FriendFeed is a personal feed aggregator. With FF you can have all your activities from various sites in one place. For example, all your Twitts, all your images on Flickr, all your blog posts -- all in one place. Other people can comment, and/or mark as "like" for your entries.

But it was not possible to have your own panoramas on FF. In fact, there wasn't a personal RSS feed on panoye.

But, from now on - your personal panorama-feed is online. The link is on every user's profile page:

Terms of Contents

After weeks of hard work, this is the first version of the "Panoye Terms of Contents" document:

Panoye - terms of service

• Panoye is a website intended for the presentation of panoramic photographs. A panoramic photograph is any photograph covering over 120° horizontally.
• By registering on Panoye you agree to all the terms and conditions of this document.
• Registration to Panoye is free. Every user may have only one user account within which all available options may be used. Every user is provided with a page containing a list of his panoramas, a short text and a link to his personal website.
• Every user is allowed to upload the maximum of 4 panoramic photographs per day.
• Photographs have to be panoramic and not contain offensive contents. Every photograph may be uploaded only once.
• The site administrators may remove photographs they find inappropriate, according to the criteria set in this document.
• The site administrators may erase unwarranted advertisement comments («spam»).
• The webmaster is obliged to respect the copyrights of contributing photographers. Every page featuring a photograph is going to contain a link to the photographer's Panoye site.
• Any user not upholding the terms and conditions of this document may be denied access to Panoye by the administrators.

Using Panoye.com contents

• Widgets (html which can be copied to other web pages) may be used without asking for permission only for noncommercial websites.
• In case you would like to use Panoye contents on commercial websites, you are obliged to contact the owner of the photograph and the Panoye webmaster for permission.
• In case you are using widgets, you must not, under any circumstances, remove the links to the users' websites and the links to other panoramas at Panoye.
• Texts such as photograph descriptions, comments, forum contents are the intellectual property of their respective authors. If you would like to use them, you have to contact their authors.
• Texts which are property of the webmaster (e. g. blog contents) may be used, provided you include the name of the text author and the link to Panoye. 

Do you think the terms are OK? If you don't agree or if you find any error - comment or email me.

Misfortune while doing a spherical pano :(

If you try to make a spherical panorama in a cold, wet and muddy place like the Baredine cave, and if you are not careful enough - this is what happens:


Well... Yes, this crack is from my Canon 300D... My brother said he can fix it (I hope he is right) and is trying right now. But for the moment - I'm without camera.

:(

Update: My brother fixed it - it works again. Thanks Bro' ! ;-)