This is the kind of thing that got me to start the thread in povray.programming
about creating a spherical camera for POV, which eventually I got to work thanks
to Chris Colefax.  I posted the convoluted code there.

The viewer I used to view the image was livepicture, formerly realspace.  It's the
only one I know of that does a full 360 view of the image.  The info about it can
be found at:

http://www.livepicture.com/

Unfortunately, they have pretty much trashed the realspace viewer by mixing it
with activex and java, and I get nothing but errors on their pages now.  It would
be nice if someone were to create a public domain viewer that just did the
panormas and skipped the browser thrashing java ect.  I think that's what has been
keeping this kind of thing from becoming a standard.  About the best thing I can
find now is Quicktime, but last I checked they still didn't have the full 360
degrees version working.  Then there's the overhead of every company wanting you
to pay to create the images, which you should could do for free if the viewer
could just read in a standard jpeg, which is what they do anyway once they see the
proprietary extension on the file.  Argggh.

-Mike

povray.org admin team wrote:

> It will probably only work in IE (when I tried Netscape, it failed to get the
> plugin).
>
>   http://www.expedia.com/daily/fullcircle/australia/surround.hts
>
> I'd really like to see if we could implement some sort of viewer that would
> allow us to do a similar thing with a POV-Ray rendering ;)
>
> After all, the input image is probably just a large 360 degree strip made with
> one of those special cameras. With the appropriate rendering it should be
> possible to do the same thing with a plugin (perhaps not that one since it's
> likely to be Microsoft proprietary).

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