Single image Pano?

[webicity]

Can the FlashPano product be used with a standard 360 single image? The tutorial uses six images. I never heard of that before in panoramas. Stitching programs and 360 decoders all generate single pano images.

[phberlin]

That "single panorama image" is called an equirectangular image (if it's a full sphere, e.g. you can look 360° horizontal and 180° up and down). It is possible with FPP, with some restrictions. This issue is discussed here (http://flashpanoramas.com/forum/showthread.php?t=159) in this forum.

Using six images means that such an equrectangular image is devided into cube faces (as if you'd cut an image into sic pieces and glue them onto a cube). There are some advantages using cubes compared to a single equirectangular pano image; for example this way you can edit nadir and zenith which is almost impossible otherwise. Converting an equirect image into cubes can on Windows easily be done for example with the brilliant free DOS for pano tools (http://www.pinlady.net/vr/#anchor3): You can convert equirectangular to cubes and vice versa.

Hope that helps...
Regards, phberlin

PS. The cubes created by DOS-for-panos are already in the order in which FPP expects them

[ericob]

Although you may not usually encounter them explicitly, the use of 6 cube faces to represent a 360 x 180 degree view is not entirely unusual.

Apple's QTVR format uses this internally, I believe. There are also variations like those six cube faces stuck together into a single file, organized either vertically or horizontally.

Thank goodness for software that can unravel these and display them in a viewing window!

[Rienus]

First of all, I would like to mention, that you need to convert your Equirectangular Image to a Cubic Format (people also use to call this output-Image "Stripe"). This can be easily done by the Program "Panorado". http://www.panorado.com --> Language-Switch to english at the right cordner in the top of the page.

Ones done, you can play the cubic Panorama with the player of Dennis: panoStripe.swf. A little advantage: you can also use this Format for SPI-V, so Dennis made his Player "Compatible" with Also's "SPI-V Engine" ;-)


An example can be found here: 1 Stripe horizontal:
http://www.ariba.ch/fileadmin/flash_pano/xml/index.html

If you have a Cylindrical Panorama
1. Stitch the image as usual

2. Make sure you change the image-size as Equirectangular (make shure the "actual cylindrical image" ist vertically in the middle, and don't worry about the black area in the top and bottom of the equirectangular image!)

The FPP Plugin "Borders" (little help here (http://flashpanoramas.com/forum/showthread.php?t=135&highlight=border)) can be used to make sure, the black area in the top-area and bottom-area aren't visible.

That's a short "guide" to how we "will" do it ;-)

GOODLUCK!