wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: Full Screen on digital projector??
Markus Altendorff 2004-Oct-20 00:55:00
Jeff Pelletier wrote:
> I?ve thought of incorporating this type of thing into future video
> projects. Haven?t tested it yet, but I think by shooting a pano with a video
> camera, you could have an action sequence that freezes, then pans/tilts, and
> un-freezes to resume the action. Sorta Matrix style but as a Pano instead of
> an Object VR.. Any thoughts on this?
This would be hard to accomplish, since you can't move the
camera. All those Matrix style F/X are based on the thrill of
freezing time, but keeping the camera in motion. However, if the
"virtual" distance between the foreground and the panorama in the
background is big enough that the viewer won't notice he's
looking at mapped sphere or cube, it could work.
Typically, panos (esp. when combined with a depth mask or even a
simple foreground/background alpha channel) make great
backgrounds for 3D animation with spinning cameras.
See these two samples (4 seconds or so each):
http://www.asamnet.de/~altendom/extmix/flyby_sample1.mov (400kB)
http://www.asamnet.de/~altendom/extmix/flyby_sample2.mov (700kB)
These are two spheres textured with the panorama, centered on the
camera, one very small (with an alpha channel to let the 3D
object and fog appear "behind" the nearby objects), the other
very large with the complete panorama to provide the distant
parts and clouds. Both spheres don't respond to the scene lighting.
By the way, the JavaScript thing DID work - remote controlling a
QTVR movie inside a web page "hand-coded" - it does a spin while
moving up and down and zooming along a sine path:
(This version is Mozilla/Firefox only! THIS IS EXPERIMENTAL AND
MAY FREEZE YOUR BROWSER IF IT CAN'T RESPOND FAST ENOUGH...)
http://www.panoramas.de/panoramas/examples/PanoSpinDemo/
Feel free to inspect the JavaScript code. It's a quick hack and
not rocket science ;-)
For it to work in IE, you'd have to replace the EMBED code with
the new OBJECT tag, and all calls to
document.embeds['qtmovie1'].something() with a call like
document.getElementById("name_of_object_id").something()
It spins by itself until the user grabs it. To re-start
auto-spinning, click the button.
Of course, one could write a JavaScript application to record
various time and pan/tilt/fov pairs in a text field that the user
could copy and paste to a new web page, and to then play that
list of coordinates back (however, it won't run that smooth, i
guess).
Regarding my search for a panoramic screen saver,
Waleed of Madeena360.com suggested this one:
http://www.immervision.com/multimedia/products/screensaver_us.php
Plays back very smooth, and could also be a nice viewer for
presentations. Has its own panoramic image format, so some
conversion is needed.
-Markus