Playing in a Dome

I love going out and creating spherical panoramas of the places I visit, its a fantastic way to capture some amazing sights. But after I've created them I'm left with the same ways to visualize them, either using some sort of interactive viewer or a flat static view which sort of removes the immersive 360° experience. Well luckily for me I've recently had the offer of a third way of viewing my work, in a 180° dome.

Last October (2013) I visited an Art event in Birmingham called Illuminate and as the name suggests it was all to do with light. The bit that I was interested in experiencing was the 360° Panoramic Cinema, not a full dome projection but a cylindrical slice all around the walls. It was here I met Toby Norman-Wright and Mario Di Maggio and got discussing my panoramas with them. I was told by Mario about another event he runs in Birmingham on a regular basis called Dome Club and I was invited to bring along some of my content to be shown.

Now we fast forward to today. After some initial experiments with preparing content for a dome, only showing an 180° view meant that you would only experience the world from the horizon up (or maybe slightly tilted forward). I started thinking about showing more, seeing a bit of the floor too. This presented it's own problem. The projection that the dome required was circular fisheye so expanding the view to 250° was not a problem. What was a problem is that the view would be distorted making buildings tower in above you and to correct this I would need to re-map my images. After a bit of scribbling ideas on paper, some Maths and a Python script to do the work my images were re-mapped and ready for projection.

I visited Dome Club being held at the Q Club Complex in Birmingham on Friday 13th June and there I was able to experience my work being projected in a 7 meter dome. I had given Mario both original and re-mapped 250° views so that comparisons could be made to judge if the re-mapping was a success and in my eyes it was. Vertical edges now appeared vertical (again) and the ceiling didn't seem so distant. It's truly a great way to re-live the immersive experience of the original panoramic image.

My static panoramas wasn't the only content that I took to Dome Club, I also took Giroptic's demo panoramic video from Times Square in New York shot on their amazing 360Cam. I converted the original 360° x 180° equirectangular projection to a re-mapped 250° fisheye. This was a bit of an experiment for me as I hadn't worked with panoramic video before and the 360Cam is still only a kickstarter project (over $1.1 million funded project at the time of writing!). The immersive experience was outstanding and from such a small handheld device. It really did show what will be possible for content creation that is then shared with a mass audience. Truly interesting times for spherical panoramic video and an area that I want to carry on experimenting with.

For anyone interested in seeing what a re-mapped 250° fisheye video looks like you can see the Time Square demo video over on my YouTube channel here http://youtu.be/VUZKKxP1DYA.

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Playing with Google Map Views

If you just want to get straight to the tour, follow the following link:
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Great+Malvern/@52.110278,-2.330287,3a,90y,240.55h,90.68t/data=!3m5!1e1!3m3!1s8VPHNkPUB-QAAAGuqllMng!2e0!3e11!4m2!3m1!1s0x4870f8ee8ec8d3fb:0xad5d1163a51c6fd


After reading about the launch of Google Map Views (http://maps.google.com/views) I thought that I would give it a go and add my own spherical panoramas to Google's Street View eco-system. There seemed to be plenty of people uploading single panoramas but I wanted to give their tour builder a try. Not wanting to start too big I chose Rose Bank Gardens in Malvern as a location to photograph. It's a small park in the centre of Malvern with a little network of paths and few entrance / exit points.

Now here is where I hit my first problem, Rose Bank Gardens wasn't mapped on Google Maps. Without this I would be dropping my panoramas into the middle of no-where. Luckily Google already had this covered with Map Maker (http://www.google.co.uk/mapmaker). It allows anyone to update Google's maps with new or corrected content. Unfortunately updates made to any of these systems aren't instantaneous and each application comes with its own learning curve. The major thing that slows down map updates is the fact that they are peer reviewed. Now in an area where there is lots of activity this might be quite a swift but here in the UK and more importantly the Malvern area it took a while. But after a few revisions I had completed the basic network of paths (I say basic because there are a few that at the time of writing I haven't yet created) and this then allowed me to move onto the next step, Google Map Views.

First I needed to shoot the panoramas. Luckily I had already shot a view by of Walenty Pytel's Buzzards sculpture so that was one down straight away. I picked a bright and sunny Sunday morning to visit Rose Bank Gardens, camera and tripod in hand. As I walked through the park I stopped at key points to shoot panoramas and by the end I had shot 23 new panoramic views. After a bit of processing at home I had 24 jpeg images ready to upload (I had to shrink my original images to meet Google's requirements). Now comes the convoluted bit, first I had to insert some metadata into my jpeg images to get Google to recognise them as panoramas. Luckily Google came to the rescue again providing a web application to do this (http://photo-sphere.appspot.com/).

Next I needed to upload my panoramas to somewhere. Now everything you do with Google is authorised through your Google account and this is no different. I had to upload my 24 panoramas to my Google Plus photo library from where I could finally add them to Google Map Views. Now all this might sound a bit long winded but some of it is being caused by the fact I shoot with my DSLR. Google's preferred route is to use an Android phone which would automatically do a lot of the steps for you.

With all 24 of my panoramas being shown on a map it was a process of placing each panorama in it's correct position, making sure north was pointing north and linking each panorama to each other. Now here is where the next delay came in, to make your panoramas visible to the public they have to be processed by Google. This time it's an automated system that looks at each panoramas to see if it is going to be accepted. Most of mine were accepted first time but a few were rejected due to my copyright notice being outside an acceptable area (not that I could find this area defined anywhere) and one which was rejected for an unknown reason that I had to take up with their support staff. Once they were all accepted the tour was visible for the world to see. To take a virtual wander around Rose Bank Gardens yourself you can follow the following link which will place you at the Belle Vue Terrace entrance:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Great+Malvern/@52.110278,-2.330287,3a,90y,240.55h,90.68t/data=!3m5!1e1!3m3!1s8VPHNkPUB-QAAAGuqllMng!2e0!3e11!4m2!3m1!1s0x4870f8ee8ec8d3fb:0xad5d1163a51c6fd

So what have I learnt through this process? Well with everything being for free don't expect things to happen at the drop of a hat and expect to have to jump through other peoples hoops not ones created by yourself. As for my tour, it uses a method of navigation that people are becoming more and more familiar with all the time which hopefully means less people being stuck on the first view not knowing what to do next. The only warning I give is that if you navigate from one of my panoramic views to a Street View view then currently there's no way back! Outside my tour I've done my small bit to improve the mapping of Malvern by defining Rose Bank Gardens.

Finally what next? Well I want to complete the Rose Bank Gardens tour but I'm going to wait until a fallen stone wall has been fixed (you can see it from the Wells Road entrance). After that who knows, there are plenty of other places to create tours for in Malvern that the Street View Car can't get to, maybe Priory Park?

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