Learning by Doing

Panorama is 360 degree representation of a physical environment or a space. It is created by capturing images from the centre point of the view of the space. This is done by placing camera on tripod at the centre point of the scene and rotating the camera at after each image is captured.

Our Snow-globe world...

We can understand this process better if we imagine ourselves inside a giant snow-globe. Say, we are standing inside the snow-globe, exactly at the centre, and what do we see when we take a look around? a) the ground we are standing on is like a huge plate,just like the bottom of the snow globe, b) the horizon surrounds us in a huge circle (of course in real life when we are standing on the Earth's surface the radius of this circle, or the horizon, is the distance till which we get clear vision. So this value can change with the movement of the observer). As we start moving up following any line along the horizon, we observe that c) the sky is creating a huge dome over us. Apart from these, all the houses, trees, mountains around us are like 3 dimensional objects scattered along the radius of the plate[see diagram].
So this is what we see, but we do not think of it in this way, because in the back of our head we know that all these are just illusions created by the trickery of perspective. We know that the ground is not a flat plane, and there is always another horizon beyond the one we see at the moment. Interestingly, in ancient times, when people haven't had such scientific notions as perspective, and curvature of the Earth, and people used to gather knowledge through straight observation by naked eyes, they actually used to perceive the Earth just like our model from inside the dome. Limitation of long distance transport actually limited the horizon of their make-belief model of the world till the distance they were able to walk, and because of this, to them Earth was actually like a flat plate!
But though we know the reality, as long as our eyes are convinced, our brain tends to believe in these visuals.

A failed attempt:

I had this plan of recreating the panorama as seen from my terrace inside the virtual world. So in order to realise the process, I drew the environment inside the ice globe, with my terrace at the centre, and tried to visualise how to go about the shoot. Check out the above diagram. The camera is at the centre of the terrace, and the red square represents a snap. So by rotating the camera along a fixed pivot point from the tripod, I'll have to take some adjoining pictures. That will complete the horizon, and then I'll have to take two more pictures, one of the sky, and another of the ground. Then I join the images together in Photoshop in order to make the panorama, and then put it inside a virtual globe created with some 3D software, put the virtual camera in the centre (well later I found out this viewing software actually exists, it's a technology designed by Apple INC. & marketed in 1994 known as QTVR or Quick Time Virtual Reality), and voila!
My virtual 3D tour is ready!.....
Unfortunately, as it can be seen from the experiments given below, this brilliant theory didn't work out. So what actually went wrong?

Panorama joined in Photoshop

It seems okay as a flat panorama image. Let's see how it turned out inside the virtual 3D space
(Move the mouse pointer inside the image window to move through the image, press shift to zoom, press ctrl to zoom out, for a full window view, go to
http://diplopanarama.99k.org/negative%20curve/full%20pan%20negative%20curve.html :





So what really went wrong in this Panorama?

1) Pathetic perspective distortion.
2) Enough photos of the sky and the ground were not taken.
3) Edge is not seamlessly attached in the panorama viewing software.

Note: The panorama is viewed here not using the QTVR, but a flash script, embedded with a HTML code. Blogger doesn't directly support QTVR format.