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Basic idea is to shoot two 360×180° panoramas of the same room from two points of view. The second point of view is shot above the first one, so the shooting setup is very easy using the vertical column of a tripod. The only thing to do is to measure the distance from first point of view to second point of view. From these two panoramas, we use the concept of stereoscopy to compute a 3D estimate of the room walls and to extract useful information such as walls edges lengths. Let us explain in further detail the whole process of StereoPano.

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Now, one can select surfaces by clicking in the main window (like the Polygonal tool from Photoshop). This will help StereoPano to identify the main flat surfaces. From now, by choosing “Compute planes”, StereoPano will estimate the exact positions of the planes and display a RMS error for each plane. This RMS states for the RMS distance between 3D points and the plane.

StereoPano then intersects planes and displays edges (in red) and their lengths (in white) with their measure accuracy (under brackets). We have checked that lengths’ accuracy are good.

You can now export some visual results such as floor plan, room wireframe, or 3D point cloud.

Through this one year study, we found out that measurements were quite good if you take precaution during shooting. We are able to measure wall lengths with an accuracy of 2 centimeter at 5 meters, which is an average error really below 1%. We’ll continue to study what is possible to do with panorama to take measurement and perhaps even see if we can create 3D models out of panoramas. If you are interested into learning more about this prototype, feel free to contact us.

Integrating a video in a virtual tour is already possible with Panotour Pro software; the new method presented today is different: it enables to integrate a video and distort it to fit exactly its right place in the virtual tour. This enables, for example, to add a person speaking and moving in the virtual tour (a shopkeeper presenting his boutique, a guide in a museum…) without seeing the seems between the photos and the video.

You can see the slideshow of the conference and the virtual tour just below.

Virtual tour: Mixed VR based on photos and video

Slideshow: Creating virtual tours today and tomorrow

Kolor Eyes video player

Kolor Eyes is a web video player designed to allow user to immerge himself into the scene during viewing. Video footage is in spherical format and consists in frames with fields of view of 360×180°. User can turn in every direction and zoom in order to position where he aims anytime. It’s now up to you to decide where to look at in the video.

Live version and demo video

You can try online version here.

Here is a demo video showing what is possible to do with Kolor Eyes. Remember to enable closed caption (CC button) to get live explanations.

Technologies behind Kolor Eyes

Kolor Eyes video player is based on 2 recent major technologies of the Internet:

• HTML5

  Video content is broadcasted through a <video> tag which is part of HTML5 specification. Data decoding is done by the browser, without any need for some additional plug-in.

• WebGL

  View frame is inside a <canvas> element with a 3D WebGL context. This brand new technology is specified by Khronos Group. It’s a set of graphical 3D features made available directly in the web page by the browser and taking advantage of the capacities of the graphical card.

No need for additional plug-in

As said earlier, the browser does give access to these technologies, thus user does not need to install any third party plug-in. All market leader browsers does not enable these technologies yet. Nevertheless, Firefox 4.0 or Chrome 10 do implement them and give the best user experiences with Kolor Eyes video player. Opera 11 will support it, and Safari enables it with a special setting. Khronos Group maintains a web page listing current available implementations of WebGL for every platform.

High level of integration

Proprietary technologies well deployed over the Internet today suffer of a lack of integration with web page content. Kolor Eyes video player breaks this statement offering new possibilities as it relies on standards. Player’s code runs directly into the browser and can access all enabled API. This allows web page developers to create better interaction between the player and online resources. We demonstrate this with snapshot feature in version 1.0.

Kolor Eyes video player features
A video player

Kolor Eyes is a video player. It has a complete set of common features: playback and audio settings control, preloading, stream quality selector, playlist, full windowed or reduced display modes. Fullscreen mode is reachable by a simple user action, depending on the browser. More features can be developed, 1.0 version embeds as an example of HTML5 capabilities a take snapshot button allowing to capture instant frame to save and share it wherever the user wants to. Kolor Eyes video player also enables camera autorotation.

Controls

Different controls are available from right column sliding menus. They expose useful camera and view settings. Projection distance makes it possible to change distance to projection plane for pannini and little planet projection modes.
Camera has several settings allowing user to have a real custom experience. Zoom speed sets the zoom actions intensity and camera speed the repositioning velocity. Camera has a spring simulating physics when moving into the scene, to give user a strong natural feeling. Two important spring settings are exposed: damping and harshness. It’s also possible to set autorotation speed in degrees per second. Positive values makes it turn to the right and negative values to the left.
All these controls are also reachable by presets assigned on projection mode change. When user selects a projection mode, some predefined settings are automatically applied to the view presenting what we think is the most interesting scene. Then it’s up to the user to modify them to create his own view.

Projections

Kolor Eyes video player allows to set the projection mode. As any other controls, it’s available anytime during playing. Projection computation is done by graphical card and reaches a precision to the pixel. This means there is no distortion in image. 6 modes are today proposed by the player.

Orthographic
	This projection mode shows the spherical video. This means fields of view of 360×180°.
Rectilinear
This projection mode is a standard lens. It’s the default mode.
Pannini
	Pannini is a large field of view planar projection that allows to display large field of view while keeping lines straight.
Little planet
Also called polar projection, everything is wrapped around a small ball.
Fisheye
	This mode corresponds to the projection given by a 180° fisheye lens.
Mirror ball
If you had a perfect spherical mirror ball, you’ll get this view.

More information

Kolor Eyes video player is at the moment at the demonstration level, and still evolving in our lab. If you’re interesting in this technology, in a futur product or if you wish to know more about this technology, please contact us with following form

The whole process is automatic; the only manual step is the video synchronization at the beginning of the stitching.

The projection mode is determined once for the whole sequence whereas the color correction adapts in real time.

For this experiment, 3 different SD camcorders were placed on a same rod and auto-stabilization was disabled. To minimize parallax errors, the subject should not be too close to the camcorders.

Smartblend ghost-remover can be improved, using temporal information.

The result obtained with this simple hardware enables to imagine very good results if using professional sequences (greater video resolution, accurate synchronization, global stabilization…).

The 3 individual video sources and the final assembled video: