Viewing Panoramas Using Live Picture

This document describes how to view a panoramic image using the Live Picture browser, version 1.0.  Because this browser runs in Java, it does not require any special plugin—anyone with a Java-enabled web browser should be able to view your panorama.  To see what you will get, here is a low-resolution and a high-resolution panorama.

Note:  the high-resolution panorama is not viewable with some browsers (I was not able to view the high-res panorama with linux, but succeeded with Windows).

It's pretty easy to set up.  You need two files

The IVR file is "invoked" from any html document.  To see how this works, click on either the low-res or high-res panorama above and view source in your browser.

The IVR file should look like:

#VRML V2.0 utf8

NavigationInfo {
    type "VISTA"
    headlight FALSE
} 
Vista {
    texture ImageTexture { url "./pano.jpg" }
    type "CYLINDER"
    vFov -0.5 0.5
    pitchRange -0.5 0.5
}

vFov is vertical field of view of the panorama (in this case, -0.5 radians to 0.5 radians).  pitchRange should be set to be the same as vFov.  Ideally, vFov should correspond to the field of view of your camera.  If the panorama has been cropped, however, vFov will be cropped accordingly.  For instance, deleting the bottom 1/2 of a panorama with vertical field of view (-pi/4, pi/4) would yield a vFov of (0, pi/4).  If you don't know the field of view, you can just tweak the vFov until the panorama looks right--you know it's wrong if the image is stretched or straight lines in the scene are not straight in the image.  Make sure to change pitchRange accordingly.

Additional Note

The company LivePicture has gone out of business, so there isn't a web resource for support of this process. We have noticed a common difficulty in getting this to work; you may get Java security exceptions. To work around this, there are two possibilities. One, download the .zip and .cab files mentioned in the above examples of web pages containing panoramas; then make the links to these files local. Two, make sure your web page is located somewhere in the CSE domain, and that you are accessing it with an http url, and not a file url; then you shouldn't get these exceptions.

For more information