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Everyone who would rather squabble than manage the Association, please step down.
IVRPA is too valuable to me, and to many others, to be allowed to fall apart now.
I believe that a lot of the problem is due to anxiety felt by BOD members who have not got time to do the administrative jobs they know the Assn. needs. Perhaps a part time professional manager and staff would help. When I was on the BOD we had enough cash flow to make that possible.
What remains of Koorneef’s tutorial is this forum post. Still very much worth studying, especially the advices on stitching technique.
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.
Roundme.com now serves 2D and 3D panormamas in both VR viewing modes: “cardboard” for any HTML5 browser, typically on phones, and WebVR for browsers, typically on headsets, that support it. So do 360Cities.net and Gala360app.com. WebVR image quality is not yet up to the level delivered by native headset apps like Oculus 360 Photos and Gala 360, but is improving.
These pictures illustrate the method on a single-row, 8-around stereo stitch in PTGui 10. Pic 1 is a detail of pano editor window showing vertical misalignment between left and right spheres. Pic2 is the lens settings tab set up for correction. Changing global vert shift from 80.6 to 0 aligned the spheres as shown in pic 3.
Attachments:
The Oculus browser will play tours that include the current krpano webVR module in full VR. That is how 360Cities and Roundme do it. There are still some issues with resolution and “shimmer”, but KR is working on those and there has been steady improvement.
For local viewing you could use the Krpano Testing Server to make your tours available on the LAN, just give the browser in the Go the URL that the server displays at startup.
Here is a set of my stereo panoramas. Best enjoyed on a VR browser.
https://www.360cities.net/sets/image_sets/stereoscopic-spheresMy helper program, PT3D, to be released in December 2016, makes stitching stereo panoramas with PTGui considerably easier, though still harder than 2D stitching. It is for photos taken with a stereo pair of cameras, not for the single camera techniques. I’ll announce it here.
Update
The just announced Google Daydream controller is a big step forward for phone VR. It is a hand held device, coupled to the VR phone by Bluetooth, that has a clickable trackpad and two buttons. In addition it has gravity and magnetic sensors and rate gyros, so the VR phone can read its orientation and speed. This opens a lot of possibilities for interaction. Vive-like gaming, of course. But hopefully this device will also stimulate the development of a standardized gesture-based browser UI. Bravo, Google!
The above mentioned solutions are for creating web content, to be accessed with a browser. To create a true self-contained app, distributed through a web store, is much more difficult. If that is your aim, you should first consult the Apple, Google and Oculus websites.
Both Pano2VR 5 and krpano 1.19 have “VR” modes that display flat panos and stereo pairs on VR devices. You can make tours with either one.
With krpano, you must use the “webVR” plugin, which provides all the VR device support, then coding the rest of the tour is almost as in previous versions. You need a lot of experience for that.
If you don’t want to code krpano, Pano2VR does everything by a UI (which can be confusing, but is very productive once mastered; and there are very good tutorial videos). However its player is not so fully developed as krpano’s.
Kolor Panotour Pro is a good but expensive GUI front-end for krpano, that many people like. I suppose it now supports VR mode.
K.C.,
Are you presenting at IVRPA? If so, please let Luc Villenueve know at once that you expect to use stereo projection. The system is fully worked out and component tested, with rental suppliers lined up and a reasonable budget. But it still needs Luc’s approval to put it on the program.
There are definitely problems with playing stereo video on krpano — or any other browser-based player I should think. But the IVRPA system will work with any player that can show a stereo pair side-by-side full screen. I have not tried Kolor Eyes, but the excellent sView player surely can — provided you get the latest version, earlier ones had a perspective bug in sbs mode. http://download.sview.ru/win/sViewSetup_v.16.04_30.exe
UPDATE
Macbook users will need to use a compatible model of the Matrox DualHead2Go graphics extender box, either DualHead2Go Digital ME or TripleHead2Go Digital SE (which is actually compatible with both Mac and PC DisplayPorts). The Digital SE model that I have only works on Windows Laptops and in fact I killed one by connecting it to the Thunderbolt port on a Macbook Pro. You may also need to install some support software from Matrox.Mac users will also need to install DisplayLink drivers for USB video output. This is proven technology, the DisplayLink chipset and API are widely used in docking ports as well as video dongles. Windows includes those drivers.
An alternative is to simply connect your Macbook to the 2D projection system as usual, and use my Windows laptop just for showing your 3D slides. That should work fine unless you are a visitor from the future whose presentation involves live 3D graphics (if you are, we need to talk).
I don’t think any of the automatic 360 camera systems will make good enough photos of an art exhibit. For that kind of work you really need a high quality camera on a pano head, a good lens of at least 12mm focal length, and good photographic skills. You must shoot raw, with careful attention to lighting to avoid glare, and to proper exposure. Don’t attempt HDR. Process for perfect tone and color. Then stitch with PTGui or Autopano.
Here’s a link to a newer version of the van Gogh paper in Word format.
BTW I have Latex source code for the pdf version, including all the graphics.
IVRPA - The International Virtual Reality Professionals Association is an international association of photographers who create and produce 360° Panoramas and other Virtual Reality Content including 360° Video, 360° Virtual Tours, Gigapixel Panoramas, and more.
This website showcases both our members and VR Photography community enthusiasts, and serves as a central place for news and communication for the 360° VR industry.
Professional and amateur and 360° VR photographers are encouraged to