Creating virtual 360 Panorama tutorial

Everybody knows how important the visualization and its role is in presentation of the design to the end user with nice photorealistic images. How is easy the understanding between the client and the designer when there are no need in explaining and thinking over drawings, plans, sketches, elevations and other raw technical information... But what if just the series of static images is not enough? What if the client wants a greater sense of presence and volume than the 2d bitmap images, while doing the animation is impractical because of the significant time and computational costs? The answer to this rhetorical and quite topical question is the pseudo three-dimensional representation of 2d images using 3d interactive panoramas technology. Such a presentation will let us see a three-dimensional picture of the visualization using the virtual camera, turn it and watch for any point around the full 360 degrees, as well as zoom in and out.

In fact, at first glance an interactive panorama consists of a three-dimensional cube, which has a stretched texture over the each side with a specific distortion (the projection of the sphere to a cube), and inside the cube is a virtual camera from which the panorama is observed.

The textures are stretched over the cube so, that seams on its corners are not visible and the illusion of the integrity of the image is created. But actually this image consists of six separate conjugating pictures, the one per each cube face. The pictures on the faces of the cube, in turn, cover all 360 degrees from the point of view. All the front, right, rear, left, up and down sides. The only feature on which we should pay attention to is the fact that the pictures, stretched over the faces of a virtual cube, should not be just flat shots of the six sides from the point of view. They must be the projections of the sphere on the cubes faces, with a sphere diameter equal to the diagonal of the cube, causing these images have the corresponding distortion.

The whole process of creating a 3d panorama is to make these conjugating texture images. Then to stitch them to the image of a special format, the so-called cubic projection.

When the cubic projection is ready, we need to stretch it over the 3d-cube and turn it to an interactive panorama using highly specialized software.