Panorama images© Anne Kellerman
Jul 26, 2003
We recently decided to change our outside house landscaping. We were pleasantly surprised to learn that if we brought a picture of the outside of our house to one of the local nurseries they would scan in the picture, attempt to erase the current set of badly deer eaten shrubbery, and then insert their suggestions for new shrubbery. We decided to take them up on this offer. Since we have a digital camera, we called to find if they would take a diskette with our picture thus eliminating the scanning step. They readily agreed to this.
After taking a few pictures with our camera, we quickly realized that if each picture would show something meaningful, we had to be close enough so that each picture captured only a small fraction of the front of the house. This was not exactly what we wanted since we wanted to see how the whole front of the house would look with new shrubs and trees. We then realized that we could try to use our Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album software, http://www.jasc.com/products/photoalbum/... to create a seamless panorama of the front of our house. Basically, you open a folder of images of portions of the front of the house, create a Jasc Photo Album with the images you want to include, and then click on the menu item, Panorama. You are then offered the opportunity to drag images from your album to the panorama window. Now, the assumption is that the images that you will drag are overlapping in a way that the software can identify the overlaps and then do the stitching together of the images correctly. There are some settings you can set which will control the size of the resultant image and the perspective of the resultant image. Jasc Photo Album does its part well. The success of the resultant panorama depends strongly on how good the original images are. Key to making them good is to use a steady tripod and to have constant exposure. We have some nice before and after shots of the house that are good for the nursery and for us to send to our friends.
Jasc panoramas result in a large flat picture which did achieve the result we wanted, but you can get fancier that that if desired. Using other software from iPIX, http://www.iPIX.com, and a special camera lens called a fisheye lens, you can create not just flat looking 180 degree images but 360 degree images that you can move around in with a mouse and other keyboard controls. A fisheye lens produces a picture that is a natural perspective for an extreme wide angle. Each shot with a fisheye lens can produce one half of a 360 degree sphere or a hemisphere. You need two images for a 360 degree iPIX image and you use software from iPIX to stitch these two images together just as you use Jasc Photo Album's software to stitch together images to create a flat 180 degree panorama. iPIX has software that allows you also to insert hotspots in the 360 degree immerse image as they are called. When your mouse moves over a hotspot you can click on it and be taken to another Web page. If you go to the iPIX web site you can see some demos of how this works. Then it is up to you to implement your ideas using this technology.
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