Make Your Own Panoramas

There’s a nice park near our office. Though it’s

called the Rose Garden, there are hardly any roses there. But the tall trees, the grass

and the absence of the cacophony of everyday life make it a welcome oasis once in a while.

I could write paragraphs on what the park looks like. But words alone won’t give you

a flavor of what the place is like. I could even include some photographs. But they would

never convey the panoramic sweep of the trees all around.

It’s in such circumstances that the

power of QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) comes in handy. QTVR can stitch together

photographs to create 360 degree views that you can navigate. These views are created as

QuickTime movies that you can view on a QuickTime player, or on a browser with the

QuickTime plug-in. You can create two types of QTVR movies. The first is the panorama,

where the camera or the viewer is at the center of the movie and is turning around. The

second is the object movie, where the camera is moving around a stationary object. In our

example of the garden, I’ll have to create a QuickTime panorama.

I used a digital camera for shooting the

pictures, though I could’ve used a traditional camera. The digital camera saved me

the trouble of buying a film, getting it developed and printed, and finally, scanning it

in, because I could straightaway transfer the pictures to my computer. Equally important,

I was able to immediately see the picture I’d shot, and could make changes if

necessary.

I set up the camera on a tripod stand at a

location that gave me a good panoramic view of the park.

The original images I shot were 1280x960

pixels and 300 dpi. This was too large for comfort. Besides, it would take a whole lot of

processing time to make a movie. So, I first reduced the resolution of the pictures. You

can use any standard graphics program to do this. Some amount of trial-and-error showed me

that 200 dpi gave acceptable results.

I used Corel PhotoPaint 9 to create the

movie. PhotoPaint 9 is available as a separate package, and is also bundled with CorelDraw

9. You also need to install QuickTime 3 or higher on your PC. QuickTime is available on

the PhotoPaint CD.

The first step is to stitch all the

photographs together. Stitching is nothing but combining the photos. Loading all the

seventeen photographs at the same time would have sorely stretched my PC’s resources.

So I loaded them one by one, stitching each to the previous before closing it.

Click here for

the details. Install Acrobat Reader from here.