All around view

It's been a week of experiments with interactive 360 degree photography. It started with a client wanting a 360 degree view of their retail space and ended up with visiting St Michael and All Angels church to see what could be done with a larger interior. The results can be seen at http://www.fords.co.nz/pano/stmichael/start.html. If you do try the link, use the 'full screen' button to see it at large scale; well worth it.

The interior was taken with six fish-eye frames - 5 horizontal and 1vertically upward. I could have taken a seventh vertically downward but didn't bother this time so there is a small black hole in the floor underneath the camera! The six pictures were stitched using 'Hugin' and the virtual reality files were created using 'Pano2VR'.

The resulting image files are quite large to download but the additional quality for zooming in on detail is worth the short wait. The image will display in a browser using either 'Flash' or 'HTML5' if Flash isn't available. Comments welcome.