Stereo 360° pano.

[YoyoBoy]

I've seen discussion lately about stereo 360° panoramas, and I'm just trying to wrap my head around how it works.

You create one panorama from one point. Great. You make another from a few inches to the left (ocular distance) to make it stereo, which will look fine as long as you're facing forward or backward, but if you rotate your head 90° one eye will be behind the other, not next to it, so it will fall apart.

I can almost conceive how it could be done as two six-image box-panos. But you would need to fix where the images meet at 45°, and I have no idea how to go about making it stereo looking up or down...

I'm confused.

[glorybound]

Well, the software does it for you. You render out the pano and use a viewer to view it.

[vlado]

You create one panorama from one point. Great. You make another from a few inches to the left (ocular distance) to make it stereo, which will look fine as long as you're facing forward or backward, but if you rotate your head 90° one eye will be behind the other, not next to it, so it will fall apart.

No, it doesn't work like that. The panoramas won't be done from one point anymore, but from a surface that sort of looks like a cylinder so that you get a stereo effect no matter which horizontal direction you look at. With V-Ray, if you set the camera type to spherical or cube 6x1, and add a VRayStereoscopicHelper to the scene, it will automatically do the right thing.

Best regards,
Vlado

[YoyoBoy]

Okay. Is this something that is only achievable with VRay, or is there some way to do it with a camera in the real world ? A photographer friend has been asking.

[vlado]

It it doable in the real world; I think there are ready made packages for stereo panoramas. Or, you set up a rig with two regular cameras next to each other, rotate the rig around and take photos every 5 or 10 degrees (not sure of the precise value here), then merge the central strips from all left and right images respectively to form the two final panoramic left and right images. Ther was a paper somewhere, let me find it...

Best regards,
Vlado

[YoyoBoy]

Vlado, if you could dig up that paper that would be great. Learning the technique could lead to some job opportunities for my photographer friend as well as me.

[vlado]

Someone posted these links a while back, maybe they can be useful.

http://paulbourke.net/stereographics/stereopanoramic/
http://paulbourke.net/papers/vsmm2006/vsmm2006.pdf
http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/

Best regards,
Vlado

[YoyoBoy]

Thanks much!