Help with Stereoscopic Panorama

[Benjamin Herchet]

Hey Guys,

I am having trouble completing my Idea and I am desperately looking for serious help.
I was planning on making some 3D (stereoscopic) 360° Panoramas which are useable in my HTC Vive for a University Project and managed to make some good progress.
Bought a Ninja MK3 Pano-Head (https://panosociety.com/collections/panoramic-heads/products/nodal-ninja-3-nn3-mk3-nadir-rotator) and a Mulit-Row Stereo Attachment (https://panosociety.com/products/nodal-ninja-dual-camera-multi-row-stereo-attachment-for-nn3-mk3-and-nn6) for that.
I did some Test-Sphere Panos und PTGUI and it worked just fine. Since some online manuals recommended PT3D for stitching those stereoscopic Panos I wanted to try it but I cant register an Account on the homepage (http://panini-pro.com/PP_License/PP_licLogin.php) to test/buy the software. I tried 2 Email of mine and even contacted the support via Email but nothing worked out.
I know there are 3D Cameras that can do all that with just one click, but since I am trying to use my Equipment, trying not to spend too much money and find a workflow with my 2 Canon 5D m2`s, I would like to stick to this Method.
So here are some Questions i can´t find an answer to:
Is there even a way with my Setup to get a 3D 360° Panos working inside my HTC Vive?
Is there a alternative to PT3D or PTGUI?
Is there a software for viewing 3D 360° Panos (currently using VR Photo Viewer from Steam Store)
I´m also trying to find an easy solution for shooting none-pano stereoscopic Pictures like Portrait or Products, but VR Photo Viewer has a fixed distance to the Image and in most cases the Picture shown is just to large and i would like to move it back. Also i cant quite figure out how to point out my Cameras correctly.

I really hope someone can help me with my project and answer me here or via Email: Odvin@hotmail.de
Thanks!

[Thomas Sharpless]

I am sorry you did not get a quick answer about PT3D licensing. I hope that problem is resolved now.

Even with PT3D, making stereo 360s is far from an automatic process, as you have no doubt already found out. There are several ways to do it, and I would suggest you first master the simplest and most reliable one: the single-camera, single-spin method. It is only good for static scenes but otherwise ideal. There is a widely known old tutorial by Wim Korneef, which is now I believe on Nodal Ninja’s website; and I have recently published a page on how I do it: http://paniniperspective.com/3D_tutorials/1Cam-1Spin/

With a stereo pair of cameras you may or may not need s/w such as StereoPhotoMaker or PT3D to correct camera misalignment and equalize the lens projections — it depends on how well matched and aligned your cameras are. Apart from that it is important to select control points only near the seam lines between active image regions, and encourage the stitcher to warp the images to fit well along those lines. PT3D largely automates that in the case where the stitcher’s default seam lines are appropriate. However if you need to — or are willing to — paint masks to define the active regions, you can also use them to control where PTGui creates control points: after preliminary automatic alignment, paint red masks whose clear areas overlap a little between images; delete all control points; generate new control points, which will be only in those overlap zones, and re-optimize. At this stage you can apply viewpoint correction to selected images, add or remove control points, and add green masking to “push” seam lines to better places. If you use need to use VP correction on all images there will be a lot of large scale distortion, which will probably throw the left and right views out of register unless you use PT3D.

One easy way to view your 3D panos in VR is to upload them to a pano sharing platform and use your headset’s browser — they all support WebVR now. Roundme.com, 360Cities.net, Gala360app.com and other accept 360 3D panos in left over right format.   If you have the time and inclination you can learn to package stereo 360s for the web with krpano (low level, some html and xml coding) or Pano2VR (high level but complex GUI).  In either case you could serve the resulting pages on a LAN, for example with the krpano testing server, or upload them to a website.

For best image quality you are probably best off displaying local files with an app that knows how to get the most out of your headset.  I am not familiar with such apps for the Vive, but I am sure Steam has plenty of them.  On Oculus Go and GearVR the Oculus Gallery app is very good.

[Author]

Posts