virtual tour camera

[sfera]

i will be doing some vt for some clients and was inquiring what camera you recommend or have on for sale?

[Juilan]

you mean like real estate virtual tour?

[duckduckgoose]

You can produce some really slick QuicktimeVR panoramas for clients seeking virtual tours for their websites (or whatever).

Here's the basics of what you would need to get started :
- digital camera [required] (mine is a 6MP, but a 3MP camera would work also)
- tripod [required] (with a mount that will screw into your camera)
- stitching software to put the images all together [required]

Here's some extras that would be nice to have :
- wide angle lenses that fit your camera


Simply put, you attach your camera to your tripod, ensure it is level for your desired application, and then take a series of pictures by pointing the camera in a circle. You take one picture at a time, then rotate the camera on the tripod a few degrees, then take the next picture. You repeat this process until you end up where you started from (the position of the first photo).

Each time you rotate the camera slightly, you should ensure there is some overlap from the previous photo you took. This is required, because the stitching software will use these overlapping regions to "stitch" the images together into a single cylindrical image.

I had great success using a software package called The Panorama Factory (search on google since I can't post links yet). Originally I was looking for Apple's own software, but this package is a lot cheaper, seemingly more available, works great on Windows PCs, and exports to QuicktimeVR format (.MOV files). It also has a nice wizard that will do most of the work for you, and asks most of the right questions to get you started.

My recommendation is to shoot as high resolution pictures as you can, since you can always downscale them later in the software. The Panorama Factory can also correct for brightness issues with your pictures (for example, where one part of the room is brighter than another when you shot the photos, like near a window).

Using a wide angle lens on your camera is highly recommended. It does add a bit of barrel distortion to the photos, but the stitching software does correct for that somewhat also. Wide lenses make it so much easier to get more of the scene into your images. If you do not use a wide angle lens, you will likely need to be more central in your shoot location, and take more shots over a larger number of camera movements. If your digital camera has a threaded lens cover (or detachable lenses), you can easily pick up some screw-on wide angle lenses for cheap on eBay for many cameras.

I can't post links to my samples since i'm a new poster here, but rest assured there's some slick stuff you can do. I do have some examples if anyone's interested.

Long story short, you can do these cylindrical panoramas yourself with some practice, and with the right (very common) equipment. There are special camera mounts you can get in order to do true three dimensional panoramas, but most clients will be blown away when they see these cylindrical versions alone. The software pays for itself after the first client.

[DesignWise]

i heard that using wide angle lense is great for landscapes

[duckduckgoose]

Wide angle lenses are great for getting more stuff into the picture without changing where your camera position is. If you're shooting indoors, this is especially important. If you were shooting portraits, wide lenses wouldn't be as useful. And without the stitching software, anything you shoot would just be disparate photos of the same scene. But together, they really work some magic.

This all sounds rather technical, but many non-adult sites on the web involving locations (restaurants, real estate, businesses, tours) really can shine when someone makes the effort to do something special like these panoramic shots.

[sfera]

hey duck awesome bro, thanks man, mind if i hit u up icq sometime?

[duckduckgoose]

i think you already did