Digital Photography Hacks

Virtual-Reality Movies from Your Digicam

You can create a virtual-reality (VR) movie with the most basic of digicams. You just need to know how to stitch things together.

[Hack #19] showed how to stitch together a series of images to make a wide panorama of a scene. This technique conveys the grandeur of impressive sites such as the Grand Canyon much better than a single snapshot. With panoramas, you can make prints or simply view the wide pictures on your computer screen.

But there’s more treasure to mine here. One of the most exciting byproducts of digital photography is a technique called virtual reality (VR). In its simplest form, a photographer puts his camera on a tripod and takes a series of pictures in a complete 360° circle around him. You use the same technique for capturing these images [Hack #19] , but instead of stopping at 120° or 180°, you keep taking pictures until you’ve completed a full circle.

For a gallery of examples to play with, go to the Cubic VR Gallery (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/gallery/cubicvr/). You’ll need QuickTime installed on your computer. Chances are, you already have it. If not, you can download it for free at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/.

Creating Your Own VR

Many cameras include bundled software to stitch your panoramas together. For example, Canon cameras come with PhotoStitch. Not only can you stitch your images together for a beautiful wide photo, but if you shoot a complete circle of images, you can also export your panorama ...