Recentred Panoramas

Introduction

• Given a spherical panorama painted onto the inside of the unit sphere (see the example above), a recentred panorama is generated by viewing the sphere from a point within the sphere and creating a new sphere about that point. This is quite different from moving the camera!
• The following examples correspond to the same panorama; the first is at the original centre, the others are recentred to a point at a radius of 0.9 corresponding to:
  • the front
  • the back
  • the left
  • the right
  • the top
  • the bottom
  of the sphere and a final one is centred near to the boat.
• Note that the movies can be viewed in full screen mode by clicking the right icon in the window.
• The ultimate aim is to give a new class of projections from the panoramic sphere to the plane to give interesting images - see some examples here.
• Note that if the new centre is on the surface of the original sphere and the recentred panorama is viewed from the new centre, we have the stereographic projection.
• One can do the same sort of thing with cylindrical projections. This is then related to the Panini projection of Bruno Postle and Tom Sharpless.

Movies (requiring flash)

• The centred panorama
• Recentred towards the front
• Recentred towards the back
• Recentred towards the left
• Recentred towards the right
• Recentred towards the top
• Recentred towards the bottom
• Recentred near to the boat

Equirectangular jpegs

• Equirectangular jpegs.

Software

• Mathmap functions for equirectangular panoramas: description and zip file containing functions.