Intro
Panoromas are a great way to share sweeping vistas op epic landscapes. The next step though, providing even more impact and a full immersive experience are Spherical panoramas !! In this blog post I'll show you what this panos can do and how to create them yourself...
Fasten your seatbelt and prepare for a life-changing impression !
The view
The panorama I recently created, provides a full 360-degrees aerial view on the village of Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort in the Gard (France). This beautiful mediaval village is situated between Garrigues and the Natural Parc of the Cévennes, on the border of the river Vidourle.
The merely "flat" images below - taken as screenshots - do not really give the full experience of the spherical panorama. But for practical reasons, here's a few of them to show off the final result.
Tutorial for making spherical panos
Since I spent quite some time figuring out how this all works: here's a small tutorial for creating and viewing 360˚ spherical panoramas. The process comprises three steps, which I will explain to you:
- Taking the pictures with a standard or a drone camera
- Fusing or "stitching" the pictures together to a full spherical panorama
- Viewing the panorama file with dedicated software, as if you were in the middle of the sphere
Taking the pictures
For starters, you will need to take a full 360˚ circle and (nearly) 180˚ up-and-down sphere of pictures. You can do this while standing on the ground, but drones are especially suitable for creating this kind of material. I do not have a drone myself, but I do have a good friend who owns a nice DJI-drone who is willing to take the pictures for me... (thanks Régis!!).
Taking four to five full circles of approximately 8 to 10 slightly overlapping pictures will result in 40, max 50 pictures (4:3, 12 MegaPixel). Make sure to have a full coverage of the area of interest. I noticed it isn't necessary to cover all the sky, unless you like to look at the clouds and sky as well !
Creating the pano
When you're finished taking the pictures you will then need to stitch them together. I did this with the app "Panorama Stitcher" Version 1.12.1 for MacOS by Olga Kacher. Using the "spherical" alignment of the photos in combination with the option "Equirectangular projection" will automatically provide the correct file format. The app is available at the Apple app store (payed version !).
The stitching results in a huge panorama file with 2:1 width : height - ratio (this ratio is essential !). The pano above is 18290 × 9145 pixels and sizes approximately 42 MB.
Edit: They now also provide for a free Panorama stitcher Mini-version, which can stitch up to five pictures. Not sure if it's suitable for spherical-equirectangular panoramas, but it can do other kind of panoramas as well !
Viewing the result
The image of the 360˚ spherical panorama can be viewed as a standard JPG-file with any software capable of handling photos. When using a standard viewer the image looks quite distorted though (as the image on top of this blog post). Also, it's just a square representation of the panorama and it doesn't submerge the viewer with the possibility to seamlessly look around.
You will need a special viewer to enjoy the full experience, though. For MacOS users there is the "Spherical Viewer" app by Olga Kacher, which is a free download from the Apple App Store.
Files can also be viewed online:
Support on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia is working to enable online viewing of 360˚ spherical panoramas on Wikipedia. There's a tool available on toolforge-website which does already enable viewing of panoramas that were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Viewing on Wikipedia is coming soon hopefully...
But meanwhile it is already possible to upload your panorama's to Wikimedia Commons, which is a great way to share your creations with the world !
- View the panorama file with panoview on toolforge as a real 360˚ panorama.
- View the "flat" file on Wikimedia Commons and upload your own !
Further readings
About Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort
- Tour historique Saint-Hippolyte du Fort (largely in dutch).
- Saint Hippolyte du Fort in Wikipedia (en)
- Saint Hippolyte du Fort in Wikipedia (fr)
-- Vidourle in Wikipedia (fr)
About spherical and other panorama's
- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Spherical_panoramics - Many other spherical pano's on Wikimedia Commons
- https://pannellum.org - Free Open Source Software for displaying spheres on you website
- https://www.3develop.nl/blog/spherical-panorama-how-to-make-little-planet/ - A "Little Planet" is a different type of pano, but cool too !
- https://ptgui.com - Multi platform Panorama creation and viewing tools - payed !
- https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/84774/how-to-convert-a-normal-photo-into-an-equirectangular-image - Some technical background info on "equirectangular" imaging.