Fisheye Photos

It's been 2 years since I was really doing a lot of research into creating 360cities type of panorama photos. I was having trouble creating a free method of doing the processing, and never had time to experiment with the programs that actually cost money. Well, since then Microsoft has created a pretty slick little program called ICE that creates panoramas and image pyramids quite nicely, and puts them in an html format, although the scripts to do this are still housed on the Microsoft servers. I don't really see this as a problem, since it still works.

I was able to create a nice little panorama of the Mountain View Caltrain station just now, and view it in both Google Earth and a browser. By default, ICE is able to handle Gigapan sized images, and therefore has 15 levels in the image pyramid. In normal sized images, such as the one it created, 7 levels is all that is necessary, and Google Earth must start level 0 at the image that spans the entire image. Therefore, it is necessary to delete the other folders, and rename the ones left 0 through 6. The code in the kml becomes:

path/$[level]/$[x]_$[y].jpg

It would take a while if there were a lot of panoramas to process, but it should be possible to automate this with a batch file or script. I think it is a real advantage to have the panoramas accessible in both an html format and KML format. I'm not sure if they can use the same images after the folders have been renamed, but it would be good if that was possible. If these images could be housed on a file server, it would really be lightning fast to go from image to image.

Now I just need to get myself a fisheye lens...