The OpenView Project

Here are a few sample QTVR panoramas from Burning Man 2008. We have over 40 GB of panoramas to go through, and we have not built the flash panorama software to accomidate OpenViews yet so please be patient.

The Temple

Burning Man Earth Secret HQ

Center Camp

I am surrounded by camera equipment, which include the following:

• 1 Canon G9
• 1 Canon G7
• 1 GoPano 360 “lens”
• 1 Egg 360 “lens”
• 8+ Camera Batteries
• 4 Camera Battery Chargers
• 1 Blip.com.au Urbi Remote Trigger
• 1 SLR Adjustable Elbow Mount
• …and a partridge and a pear tree

I’ve spent at least $4,000 trying to get this right, and with all this equipment, I’m not sure what the magic bullet is. The Canon G9 can’t do the CHDK, but it can become an intervalometer with the Urbi. The only problem with the Urbi is that you can’t manually adjust the zoom because it restarts the camera, and takes it over like a computer might. We can control the zoom with some R/C equipment, but that remains to be seen. I’ve been trying to contact the maker of the Urbi, blip.com.au, but they are unresponsive. I don’t think they care about their customers. Anyways, this is what leads me to the Canon G7…

This week, I ordered a G7 from a nice guy off Ebay because of the Urbi’s shortcomings. The G7 does have CHDK support! This means I can (and have) taken pictures with all the settings set, and can get it to do it as often as I want, for as long as I want. Essentially, I have exactly what I want. Only thing is, it’s been hacked to be Infrared. This is weird, and cool at the same time. It means shots don’t have a natural color, but they also can be taken in times that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to, like dusk. Neat huh?

So why two 360 lenses? As I posted earlier, I originally got the GoPano. It’s a very nice mirror, but it’s mounted on a very flimsy piece of Plexiglas. When I start riding the trike, the mirror starts to shake back and forth, much more than the camera does. I bought the EGG because it’s built with a plastic housing, and mounts directly to the camera. It seems like a better solution, but the viewing angle is much lower, so I may well end up in the shot.

It all seems like the optimal solution is still far away, but my deadline is here. I’m packing for Burning Man, and there’s no time like the present. My hope is between myself and my brother, we’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out, one way or the other.

Another major milestone reached! We have turned the tricycle (our three wheeled polycycle) into a tripod. All the credit on this one goes to Brent, who did some welding to make this happen. The top of the “mast” has a regular camera mounting point with a level, which can hold any camera, as well as the GoPano and the SLR mounting bracket we bought. In the future, we can also use this three wheelin’ tripod to attach other panoramic cameras or even a gigpan to stop and take gigapixel photos of special spots.

Evonne on the Tadpole Tricycle Tripod

In the interest of getting something playa-ready in the short amount of time before Burning Man, I purchased a Kaidan GoPano lens and a special mounting bracket that is designed for SLRs. This means instead of multiple cameras which have the problem of parallax, we have a single camera, which takes a picture of a mirror. This approach is far simpler, and costs approximately the same amount as multiple cameras. I still want to do multiple cameras in the future as it will yield far better resolution, but a single lens means we have the ability to take photographs of subjects that are extremely close to the lens without too much distortion.

So now, I am trying to decide between the Canon G7 which supports the CHDK (cannon hack development kit), and the Canon G9, which does not, and doesn’t easily support remote triggers (what was Canon thinking?). I am attempting to get a trigger built by an R/C company called Blip, but they haven’t responded to my emails yet. It’s frustrating because I really would prefer the G9, which would allow us 12.1 megapixel photos instead of 10 megapixels.

Only 22 more days until I need to be on the road to the Black Rock Desert. I hope it all works out!

This is the base of our soon-to-be mobile tripod. With 24-speeds, this sun ez-tad recumbent is perfect for taking panoramas from. Right now, my friend Brent from ToyShoppePro (BoomToysLabs) is working on the camera mount. I’m leaving for Yosemite for five days, so I’m curious to see what he’s come up with when I get back.

More pictures soon…

I am waiting to finish off the bottom of my mounting box to test out the setup and see if I can make 3/8th of a panorama. I am aware of the problems with parallax, which is when objects are viewed at different angles. This is an advantage to us humans as it allows us to determine the relative closeness of things because we have two eyes. With the pano-cam I’m building though, it will potentially be a big problem due to the artifacts created in the stitching process.

Panoguide says this on the subject of panoramas and parallax:

If everything in the scene is approximately the same distance from the lens, or very far away, the parallax effect will be elminated or at least minimized. This is why hand-held panoramas from a mountain top tend to work quite well - everything is far away from the camera, and because the distances are very large compared to the tiny distance between the nodal point and the point of rotation, parallax is negligible.

So, as people get closer the the cameras, the more parallax will be apparent in the resulting panoramas. This is unfortunately the trade off of taking higher resolution photos with off the shelf equipment. Instead of 10-12MP panoramas with a 360 lens, I expect to be getting 40+ megapixel panoramas, which will give more of the experience of being there by being able to zoom in on parts of the photo. I absolutely love the gigapan project for this reason, and I’m hoping users will appreciate the higher resolution too.

So that being said, I won’t really know what it will look like until I run tests, which should be very soon. My hope is that it will be “good enough”, because it’s going to be awhile until I’ll be able to afford going the other one-camera-with-a-360-lense route.

I’ve mounted the original three SD1000’s, and I think everything looks pretty good, so I went online to try to buy more Canons, only to find that the SD1000 is being phased out. Unfortunately this doesn’t mean I get huge savings, each came out to be about $180 after shipping. At least I’ll have them soon, along with the 10 8GB SDHC flash cards I purchased to finish up the construction.

I’m also working to figure out how to attach the camera box to the trike at eye level, at around 5.5 feet. My plan is by using a recumbent trike, I’ll be able to hide completely underneath the camera housing, and get the perspective of a normal person. What I’m going for is the experience of being there, and so I want to make it seem as seamless as possible. I hope the trike isn’t caught in the shot at all.