"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
- James Madison

New gallery
Friday, August 18, 2006 | Permalink

I've added another gallery with pictures from this summer. This one also includes an interactive element. I've made a java applet using OpenGL to render cubemaps. I've stitched together a bunch of cubemaps from a bunch of photos in all direction, and I've included a few of these in the gallery.

Name

Comment

Enter the code below



Nikita
Friday, August 18, 2006

What is needed to view these interactive photos?Besides OGL driver.

Humus
Friday, August 18, 2006

You need to have java installed. Not sure how old versions it will work on, but if you installed the latest JRE it should work.

Chris
Wednesday, August 30, 2006

How have you made those cubemaps? How many photos did you use?

Twixn
Thursday, August 31, 2006

I'd assume it would be from 6 photos
(up, down, and along the lines of North,
South, East and West).

But then im assuming this from knowledge of
cubemaps, not panoramic photos :P

-Twixn-

Humus
Friday, September 1, 2006

Well, if I had a camera with 90 degrees field of view that also produced square pictures and had no distortion, plus I had equipment to aim it perfectly in the six directions, then that would work. No, I only have a regular P&S camera with about 62 degrees FOV horizontally and a tripod, so I have to shoot a whole bunch of photos. Usually I do one center 360 row of 8 pictures, then 8 or sometimes just 6 pictures in a row above it and below it. Then 4 in the topmost row, and 3 down without getting the tripod legs in the view. Then finally I remove the tripod and shoot the last picture with it handheld leaning forward to avoid getting my feet in the view. Actually, I shoot a bunch of down pictures to hopefully get at least one that fits decently. Then I load it up in RealViz Stitcher and render a cubemap. Finally, I edit it a bit in photoshop if neccesary if there's any artifacts or ghosting.

Twixn
Friday, September 1, 2006

Heh, why do they have to make cameras use such odd dimensions?

90 Deg square images would suit us all so much better.

-Twixn-

zxwyeah
Monday, September 4, 2006

Take this idea further, you can take some '3D' screenshots in game and view them outside the game using your fancy applet as if you were in the game.

3D screenshots! Dude, that'll be awesome!

Humus
Monday, September 4, 2006

Well, that can certainly be done. That's a cool idea actually. For my own demos where I have full control it would be easy to just get the right screenshots in all directions directly. For a game I may have to revert to taking a load of screenshots looking in different directions, unless the game has flexible commandline options or something.