Digital Photography Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 55 Virtual-Reality Movies from Your Digicam

You can create a virtual-reality (VR) movie with the most
basic of digicams. You just need to know how to stitch things
together.

[Hack #19] showed how to
stitch together a series of images to
make a wide panorama of a scene. This technique conveys the grandeur
of impressive sites such as the Grand Canyon much better than a
single snapshot. With panoramas, you can make prints or simply view
the wide pictures on your computer screen.

But there's more treasure to mine here. One of the
most exciting byproducts of digital photography is a technique called
virtual reality (VR). In its simplest form, a
photographer puts his camera on a tripod and takes a series of
pictures in a complete 360° circle around him. You use the
same technique for capturing these images [Hack #19], but instead of stopping at
120° or 180°, you keep taking pictures until
you've completed a full circle.

For a gallery of examples to play with,
go to
the Cubic
VR Gallery (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/gallery/cubicvr/).
You'll need QuickTime installed on your computer.
Chances are, you already have it. If not, you can download it for
free at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/.

5.10.1 Creating Your Own VR

Many cameras include bundled software to stitch your panoramas
together. For example, Canon cameras come with
PhotoStitch. Not
only can you stitch your images together for a beautiful wide photo,
but if you shoot a complete circle of images, you can also export
your panorama to a QuickTime VR movie, as shown in Figure 5-13.

Figure 5-13. Exporting a panorama to a QuickTime VR movie

After the images have been converted to a VR movie, you no longer
view them in a traditional image editor such as Photoshop Elements.
Your movies are now "played" in the
QuickTime Player, where you can spin around in a circle just as if
you were standing there in real life, looking around at the scenery.

You can send these movies to friends as email attachments (be sure
your friends have enough bandwidth to download them), or you can post
them on your web site for everyone to enjoy. They are truly
spectacular.

If your camera didn't come with software for saving
your 360° panoramas as QuickTime VR movies, there are some
affordable third-party solutions out there. For example, ArcSoft
makes a lovely tool called PanoramaMaker
(http://www.arcsoft.com/en/products/panoramamaker/)
that is effective and easy to use. It runs on both Mac and Windows
and sells for US$40. You can download a demo version and give it a
spin, so to speak.

When you first launch the application, select which type of panorama
you want to make. Choose 360°, as shown in Figure 5-14. This tells the program to prepare your series
of images in such a manner that they will export easily to the VR
format. Now click the Next arrow, which takes you to a screen where
you add the series of photos that will comprise the VR movie. Make
sure your photos are in the proper sequence, add them to the
timeline, and then hit the Next arrow to stitch them together and
build the sequence. Now, all you have to do is click the Export
button, and PanoramaMaker will build your VR movie and save it for
you. Amazing!

Figure 5-14. Creating a QuickTime VR movie in PanoramaMaker

If you've been using the PhotoMerge function in
Photoshop Elements to create your traditional panoramas,
you'll be disappointed to discover that it does not
have an option to export to QuickTime VR. I looked at some Photoshop
plug-ins that might solve this problem, but I didn't
find anything as effective, cheap, or easy to use as
ArcSoft's PanoramaMaker or the software bundled with
your camera.

Virtual-reality movies are truly impressive, and possible, with any
digital camera. Just apply a little computer magic, and take the
world for a spin.