What gear and setup do I need to shoot a Street View–style 360° panorama?
Asked 11/5/2014
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I’d like to create a stationary, Street View–like spherical panorama similar to Google’s examples. What is the minimum equipment needed, and how does the setup change depending on quality? I’m interested in practical options ranging from a phone or compact camera up to DSLR or dedicated 360 cameras.
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
11y ago
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360x180 panos can be taken with a variety of gear, but they do get harder to take in certain situations.
The first factor, obviously, is scene coverage. Either taking multiple shots or using multiple cameras simultaneously (as Google does), you have to cover the entire sphere. You can use specialized lenses to maximize the coverage per shot, or take more shots and stitch. With a typical rectilinear wide-angle gear (say, an EF-S 10-22 @10mm on a Canon crop body), this may encompass 14 to 24 shots, and requires shooting multiple rows and possibly a zenith (straight up) and nadir (straight down). Or, you could use a fisheye lens and as few as four shots.
The second factor is parallax error. The closer objects of interest are in a panorama like this, the more critical parallax error between member images becomes, and the more you have to rotate the lens around its no-parallax point for a clean stitch. Some scenes allow for handholding, others may require a tripod and specialized panorama head.
A third factor is movement. Multiple images stitched together always holds the potential for creating "ghosts" or "clones" when the images are combined. If you need to capture a spherical view with a lot of moving subjects or from a moving vantage point, then you will need to take all the member images simultaneously, which will require a special multi-camera rig, or you have to be ok with motion blur, or taking multiple shots through time, and masking out the bits of moving things that could cause ghosts/clones.
A fourth factor is your stitching software: not all applications can create a 360x180 panorama, because the internal model of the panorama may be assuming cylindrical presentation or a less-than-360 degree field of view on the stitched panorama. One open source cross-platform package that can do 360x180 panoramas is Hugin.
A fifth factor is presentation of the panorama. Typically, some sort of specialized viewer that can pan through the image on the fly is required, and you need to get the panorama into the proper format for that viewer. There are a number of solutions, mostly based on HTML5 or Flash, but there is no specific universal format (especially since Apple stopped supporting QTVR cubics).
See also:
Originally by user27440. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user27440
11y ago
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You can make a Street View–style image with anything from a phone to a multi-camera rig, depending on quality and convenience.
At minimum, a smartphone with a sphere/panorama app can create a basic 360° image. A compact or DSLR can also do it by shooting multiple overlapping frames and stitching them later.
Key requirements:
- Cover the full sphere: 360° around, plus up and down.
- Overlap frames by about 40% for reliable stitching.
- Minimize parallax error, especially when nearby objects are present. This is why careful camera rotation matters.
Typical setups:
- Rectilinear wide-angle lens: often needs many shots, possibly 14–24, in multiple rows, plus zenith and nadir.
- Fisheye lens: can reduce this to as few as about four shots.
- Dedicated 360 camera: uses multiple very wide lenses and stitches automatically, making the process much easier.
Google Street View capture is typically done with multiple cameras shooting simultaneously, which helps with moving subjects. With a single camera, moving people or cars can cause stitching problems because they appear in multiple frames.
If you want the simplest route, use a 360 camera. If you want higher quality from a fixed position, use a camera with a wide or fisheye lens and stitch overlapping shots.
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