Creating panoramas

[webber_my]

Who knows how to create panoramas such as presented here: http://nerusoft.com/vtur.html

What to do this? What equipment and software?

[kagenaki koe]

first thing that came to mind was quictime vr (something tomato/underworld used to do a long time ago)

list of programs
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/resources/tools/authoring.html
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/resources/tools/qtvr.html

samples
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/gallery/cubicvr/

if you look at the times square new york sample you'll notice that some of the people's legs are missing

[TheBang]

There are many different software packages that can stitch the photos together into a panorama. The hardest part it getting the proper photos in the first place.

There are 3 main types of panoramas: cylidrical, spherical, and cubic. Cylindrical you can do with just one row of photos, 360 degrees around, 20-30% overlap. Spherical and Cubic are essentially the same, but require either fish-eye lens or multi-row shooting, which can be hard.

One way to do it is with a fish-eye lens. That requires far fewer photos, and is easier for capturing dynamic motion. If you don't have a wide-angle lens, then you have to be careful about action crossing the seams between the photos.

Oh, and make sure you lock the exposure setting for all the photos. Otherwise you'll get different exposures across different segments of the panorama, and it just looks ugly, and it's really hard to correct.

Kaidan makes panoramic tripod mounts that make it a lots easier to shoot panoramas:

http://www.kaidan.com/

Once you have the photos, then you have to stitch them together. There are tons of software packages that can do this. It depends on your delivery system too. I'm most familiar with QuickTime VR, and QuickTime is pretty ubiquitous, so it's not a bad choice. For QTVR, your best software choices are probably Stitcher (http://stitcher.realviz.com/) or VR Worx (http://www.vrtoolbox.com/). For cylindrical panoramas, I'm still partial to QuickTime VR Authoring Studio, but it's Mac OS 9 only, and hasn't been updated in a decade.