In light of the enthusiastic response from several of you to the "PanaView" Java
applet I mentioned yesterday, I decided to do a little more tinkering with it.
What I've done is cobble together my own "VR panorama" using nothing but
shareware and low-tech camera work, just to see how feasible it was; the short
answer is, "fairly".
Here's what I did:
(1) borrowed my pal's el-cheapo digital camera (an older Epson), then hiked to a
nearby railway trestle that affords a good view of part of my town.
(2) snapped a dozen photos, *very* quickly and without benefit of a tripod of any
sort. (The "quickly" part is because I was (a) about 60 feet above a set of nasty
rapids, on (b) a very narrow trestle, while (c) fighting a cyclone-like headwind, and
(d) anxiously awaiting the arrival of the west-bound freight, which was due any
minute. Yikes. So the photos were not of, shall we say, the sharpest or most rock-
steady quality :)
(3) copied the photos to the PC, then fired up Paint Shop. Stitched all the photos
together manually, then set about cleaning up shaky focus, inconsistent exposures,
etc. (I quickly discovered that as you shoot pictures around 360 degrees on a
bright sunny day, the exposure varies greatly from frame to frame.)
(4) used PanaView to enable the "scrolling panorama" effect, also embedding a link
(to a "zoomed" image) in it.
So what I ended up with was a sort of "poor man's LivePicture" effect, but without
any investment in server software, authoring programs, etc. Just stuff I had on
hand already. The image quality isn't great by any means, but OK under the
circumstances. The embedded link is also a little dicey, because it's too easy to
accidentally click on it (thus jumping to a new page) while dragging the mouse
through the panorama. Still, an interesting effect for no investment. (The link is
on the image of the tall stone building about half-way through the panorama, BTW)
http://www.almonte.com/pana/index.html
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Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Town of Almonte: http://www.almonte.com/
Business Web site: http://www.almonte.com/brent/
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