Panoramas vs. Photosynth (Part 2): What Are They?

This is a continuation from Panoramas vs. Photosynth Part 1.  In Part 1, we discussed some characteristics that we may use to determine which one is better.  But before we delve into that, let me describe a bit more about these methods of capturing our world.

Panoramas

Panoramas assume that pictures are taken from a common point in space (i.e. pivoting around the entrance pupil).  That’s why a panoramic heads (shown below) are important in minimizing errors caused by parallax, so we can stitch a nice panorama without much visual artifacts.  Also, due to their immersive nature, many images are necessary to take a full 360 x 180 degree panorama.  Many people resort to using wide-angle or fisheye lens to lessen the quantity of images necessary to cover all view directions.

Panoramic tripod head

Panoramas are amazing in their immersive nature — you really do feel like you are there.  And the continuity of the experience is just fantastic in describing the scene captured.  But the constraints on the acquisition process make it more difficult to capture than just taking regular pictures.

Another limitation is that the users cannot move around in space.  But of course, I will argue that EveryScape has solved that.

Photosynth

Photosynth, on the other hand, has no such constraints when acquiring images.  You don’t have to be anal about the “entrance pupil,” or the “no-parallax point,” or the “pivot point” or all that BS.  Although technically rational, these constraints really do suck for the picture takers.  (That’s why there are gazillions more regular photographers than panoramic photographers.)  In taking pictures for Photosynth, there just needs to be sufficient visual overlap between them, such that the computer algorithm can automatically try to determine where the pictures were taken from.  This also means that you can move around in space!

But often times, using just pictures do suck in a sense that the users don’t quite feel immersive.  Immersivity is one of the qualities I mentioned in Part 1.  I was talking to a friend of mine a while back (@billwarner), and he said to me, “Don’t break reality.”  In many ways, if you “break reality,” then you don’t gain as much confidence from your users about the space you are describing.

So, What Next?

There are pros and cons for both these methods and in the next part, we will start to compare them and grade them if we can.