FOV limits in Settings

[Robert Harshman]

With the ever increasing use of wide format displays and vastly different pixel dimensions used, a question new at least to me is:

How does the limit in settings for FOV work, is it relative to the window size set when the VR is produced?

The reason I'm asking is in another forum someone just showed me a screen capture they made of one of my VRs. When I generated the VR I set the window size to 1024 by 768 (my default) but limited the FOV max to 105 degrees. In one of the screen captures shown to me it appears that they had a FOV of about 160 degrees or more. This was from a wide format display.

So, just trying to understand how the FOV limit works and to figure out a perhaps better setting for full screen use.

*****NEVER Mind, just found out the FOV limit, that is QT's FOV is based on the vertical FOV, not the horizontal.

Regards,

Robert

[360Texas]

Robert, I enjoyed your website... Are you in Austin now?

[Robert Harshman]

Thanks for the compliment 360Texas.

Sorry to say I just flew back to Chicago a few days after the South by SouthWest festival was over. Really a shame as the blue bonnets were really coming up. I've made it a personal goal to make a few really nice panoramas of this beautiful flower. O'well, perhaps next year. I probably won't be back in Austin until sometime in May.

Too much work in Chicago still, and I'm just really getting started pushing for work in Austin.

Also would have like to have gone to the IAPP meeting in Austin, April 15-17 but did not know about it until I was already booked else where. I'll be in NYC of all places going to the APAD show.

Here's the VR I've just finally produced, was shot months ago that caused my question above. The FOV has been set to 105 on open and thats whats causing the extreme FOV on wide screen displays. It would be wonderful if Thomas could add a sprite or java script to dynamically size the FOV based on the viewers screen aspect ratio.

And for some of you, a warning, this is a full screen QT link, so it will resize your browser.

http://www.robertharshman.com/CCC/CCCGAR.html

Regards,

Robert

[360Texas]

Yes the SxSW finished last week. Time passes quickly when you are having fun. Guess you departed before all the rain hit the Metroplex.

I have seen a couple of the dome panoramas on your site... truely dynamic location for qtvr's. That CCCGAR dome opened up quickly across my 22" flat panel. Big is a good thing. Specially when this work has so much detail. I personally hate floor tile of any size, but cubing the image and fixing the zenith and nadir works real well in Thomas's pano2qtvr.

I am curious... what camera, lens, pan head combination did you use? I am guessing a Nikon with the Nikkor 10.5.

We got about 5" of rain over this last week so Blue Bonnets should really busting out all over. Maybe I will go in search of.. and put my pan head right on the ground and see what develops.

I suspect you are interested in the optimum vertical field of view so as to minimize the barrel distortion. You already know how to figure out the initial angle of view.. most of your dome panoramas start at the zenith. While setting the angle of view.. try zooming into around 90. That point is about the normal "eye" view angle.

A year ago a fellow created a technical FOV vs size of viewer dimension web page. You key in the viewer window dimension size + height and width of your panorama it calculates the optimum FOV.

But this won't help if you are planning to just have the panorama open to the monitor 'full screen' because each monitor has different dimensions. Hence, just try using 90 for full screen displays.

[Robert Harshman]

Camera - Canon 400D
Lens - Canon 10-22mm at about 19mm
Precision360 Adjuste head
Shots required - 38 per set - ouch!
Number of exposures - 3 per set or rotation - triple ouch! 114 total with mirror lock up, yes 228 clicks with shutter speed as low as 8 seconds - do the math, this took a bit of time to shoot, no wonder you don't see any people in it.

All shot in RAW, is there any other format?

Three EQ files about 21,000 by 10,500 output from PTGUI (1.4 gigabytes or so each as 16 bit TIFF)

Hand merged and downsized in PS2 to fit current version of Pano2QTVR file size limits.

Cubic tiles generated at 4999 pixles to again fit within Pano2QTVR flie size limits.

Nadir cloned from existing parts of bottom cube, Zenith from stitch, not altered.

Massive downsizing in final Pano2QTVR to fit within "reasonable" file size limits for internet.

Technical stuff finished - on to real life

Hey, go out and shoot those flowers as much as you can, extremely sad I'm not there now. This year will probably be one of the best years for a long time to shoot Texas wild flowers. Just use your big lenses for traditional pano's, forget VR's for that subject. And yea, get as close to the ground as you can!

Good luck and shooting!

Robert

PS, if it's possible in QT and/or flash get Thomas to write that dynamic script to check the viewer aspect and then adjust. As an artitst (yea at least that's what I think) I want to control the viewer FOV regardless of their monitor dimensions!