My brother sent me snowmoun.exe about a month ago. The 360x360 degree (all 
over the place) view is great but the perspective warping is always an 
undesirable effect of these panoramic scenes in my opinion, something without 
pixel distortion would be tremendous to see too.
My casio digital camera came with Spin Panorama to create these and I've made 
a few. Turns out it takes just 8 photos mended together, not 12 to 36 as was 
mentioned. The lens being so wide angle on my camera that the perspective 
warping is quite noticable (forget about trying anything even slightly up or 
down from level) but I guess a narrower angled lens would help prevent it. 
When I tried the same thing in Pov, I used an 8 frame sequence rotating the 
camera set at the center then converted to jpg and used them in Spin Panorama. 
Problem is there is a limited up/down, doesn't do this like the snowmoun.exe.
As Mike H. said, such a viewer would be good to have.
That "pantest", Ron Parker, is interesting because it has no perspective 
warping that I could tell. Zoomed in a great deal perhaps?

Message <362E5ED9.C69712DF@aol.com>, Mike  typed...
>
>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).
>
>
>

-- 
 omniVERSE: beyond the universe
  http://members.aol.com/inversez/POVring.html
=Bob

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