Posts Tagged ‘virtual Reality’

360 degree photographs and 3D

April 12, 2011 Leave a comment

360 degree photographs have been around for quite a while. Here’s a hi res image of St Pauls Cathedral.

The problem is of course that you can only see everything from the position of the camera. I got to thinking how neat it would be if you could actually move around the image and see things from different points of view. This would of course require that you take millions of 360 degree pictures from pretty much every physical point within the area you are photographing. Not entirely practical.

But then I got to thinking about the sort of technology being used by numerous people in conjunction with the Microsoft Kinect to generate 3D images. Some cleaver mapping software lets the the viewer see things from points other than the Kinnct’s physical location.

So here’s my thought. Merge 360 degree photography with the 3d software being used by Kinect hackers to generate a virtual 3d environment. You would only need a limited number of actual 360 degree photographs in order to dynamically recreate a 3d space by dynamically generating the view for points between the actual photographs.