[ FOUR MAJOR TYPES OF PANORAMA VIDEO] posted December 03, 2008 (Revised '10/08/12) Here we are exhibiting four major types of panoramic video sequences currently used in the community for showing panoramic, perspective, rectilinear, or other types of projected views of the video image. Click on the photograph exhibited below to play each of the video in a reduced form. While the Ladybug™ system by Point Grey Research or the DODECA 2360 Camera System™ by Immersive Media Corporation might be one of the most sophisticated and ideal solutions to capture 360-degree videos, i.e., full-sphere motion pictures, both of them are still too professional and not affordable as well for the majority of ordinary panorama shooters. What we try to propose here is a simpler and more affordable approach to shoot and publish panorama videos using a bowl-shaped mirror or panoramic annular lens such as 0-360.com's 0-360 Panoramic Optic™ in combination with our free Flash-based panorama video viewer; PanoDoughnutFlashVideo. PanoDoughnutFlashVideo allows you to directly and simply publish doughnut-shaped video clips on your Web site without the need of any coordinate transformation beforehand. The video sequences we exhibit here are all generated from a footage captured through the Panorama Optic, along with a non-professional HD camcorder; Panasonic's HDC-SD5. [Doughnut-shaped video] Let us call this type of video as "doughnut video" in short. Shooting a doughnut video might be the most convenient approach to produce a panoramic video sequence as it does not require a cumbersome post process such as stitching multiple moving images into a single and integrated panoramic video sequence. While the simplicity or convenience apparently trades off the image quality such as resolution, linearity and space-coverage, one of the biggest benefits of the doughnut approach might reside in its handiness or portability allowing you to carry the system with you wherever you go, as well as in the fact that a range of commodity components including SD memories, batteries, tripods, monopods and others can be fully leveraged. Click here to show a rectilinear view of the doughnut video using PanoPlayer (playmode=doughnutvideo). [Spherical Video] This is so-called equirectuangular type of video sequence, usually tranformed from a doughnut video as shown above, or stitched from a multi-camera video shooting system such as the Ladybug™. Click here to show a rectilinear view of the spherical video using PanoPlayer (playmode = spherevideo). [Cylindrical Video] This is another rectangular video where cylindrical projection is assumed for generating normal (rectilinear) view. Click here to show a rectilinear view of the cylindrical video using PanoPlayer (playmode = cylindervideo). [Cubic Video] This is usually transformed from an equirectangular type of video, or directly from a doughnut type of video. A benefit from this type is that you can get improved linearity as each of the six images is already transformed into a rectilinear projection, while the transforming process requires higher quality of video encoding. Click here to show a rectilinear view of the cubic video using PanoPlayer (playmode = cubevideo).
Operated by Ryubin Office, Kanagawa, Japan (http://www.ryubin.com/). Since February 9, 2007.