An Inexpensive Video Panorama System
bcmeikle@shaw.ca     Week 1,  , Week 2 , Week3 , Week4 , Week5 , Week6
Week   4:

I'm calling this week 4 but I just needed to break the pages up. Today is really only feb 21st... midwinter work rush
has been quite profound this year... This project started on the 13th only 8 days ago and we are already shooting panoramic video from cartops with the 6-camera rig we built and saving it to the application we wrote...

Of course Jon Summers down on the beach coast of australia has gotten really into it. We've been video chatting, and the 6 camera rig is my side, so I can flip between cameras and show him issues.... The little app for the 'hexacam' now displays and records the six cameras in realtime. We're working on post stitching methods, and realtime stitching, two thing I thought I wouldn't get to for a couple months...

Having great people working on the project all over the world is pretty nice... Anders Jiras in Sweden did a lot of the work below, and Irene Blueth on Cortez Island B.C. spent a lot of time on the stitch. With Dennis in France it's quite the international effort... (paul stewart in cambodia might get involved soon...) It helps that I've been working on panoramic imagery with people all over the world for almost a decade through my apps...
      
         There are a couple of movies you can get involved in here too!:

This pano was the second shot with the home-made  hexicam.The stitch is by Anders Jiras in Sweden...






It has some windows that are a bit too washed out, and one of the cameras fell off it's mount again so it's got black
rectangles to fix things...but for the history of the project it might be worth finishing...(and cropping) (at that point I was only shooting one camera at a time so there are issues that no longer exist with overlap).
If you look at this pano with a dog getting onto the couch you'll see the project.
2dog


I have a 98 image sequence of the dog walking around the room. It's interesting because the dog goes back exactly to where he was lying, so it makes a good loop... (I hope, perhaps)
      Each pano needs to be stiched using this PTMAC project . Then the next image needs to be added and the pano needs to be stitched again. The images are here .
In the end you should have a pile of sourcepict sized images that can be pasted together into a single animated quicktime movie.(not unlike the ones below but stitched)  You can then export this animation using sorenson to get a final small file and email it to bcmeikle@shaw.ca . It's amazing how 50 meg of images becomes a file that's under a meg!  When I get it I'll just drop it onto the spriteorama tool in vrhotwires and post it here...(or if you have vrhotwires, try it!)

Project 2:

          Here we look at the first cartop homemade hexicam shot:







This format of 6 images side by side is what we get now when we save from the hexicam. We are looking at standard stitching methods and also realtime stitching
for later...

     The image sequence is here . (no it's not this is now complete)
230 odd images that need to be stitched using
PTBatch. Once the stitch is perfect and the batch is worked out, it should work for all future images from the camera.


Check out the stitched movie !