A client of mine recently con­tacted me in regards to putting “inter­ac­tive” panoramic videos on their web site, sim­il­iar to those typ­i­cally found on realty sites. The prepa­ra­tion for this kind of job isn’t extra­or­di­nary nor is it dif­fi­cult but it is time con­sum­ing and in this instance patience is cer­tainly a virtue.

First, you have to decide whether or not you’ll be using a con­ven­tional or dig­i­tal cam­era. Depend­ing on what you use, the results will vary in qual­ity clar­ity, and res­o­lu­tion. Using a tri­pod is rec­om­mended and impor­tant in order to line up your pho­tos and mea­sure your shots incrementally.

For 360 degree images, it’s sug­gested that you take between 12–15 pic­tures depend­ing on the lens of your cam­era. The eas­i­est way to accom­plish this is to think of the num­ber posi­tions on a clock and take each photo at these posi­tions, sim­il­iar to the mil­i­tary tech­nique of plot­ting points on a landscape.

Each photo should over­lap about 15% 33–50% (thanks Erik) and with a decent tri­pod it’s just a mat­ter of mea­sur­ing and esti­mat­ing. Most panoramic soft­ware will blend these images seam­lessly and allow you to line up (using an onion skin effect) adja­cent pho­tos. Some­times this is referred to as “stitch­ing” and depend­ing on the soft­ware you use this is either han­dled auto­mat­i­cally or man­u­ally, but you’ll find that no mat­ter how per­fect it seems you’ll most likely have to fid­get with the pho­tos in order to pro­duce the desired effect.

If you’re savvy enough with Flash and would much rather not pur­chase off the shelf soft­ware, you could always use Action­script to pro­gram a panoramic viewer. For the less tech­ni­cally inclined or for those who have a shorter time frame you’ll find that most panoramic soft­ware, like Panorama Fac­tory will out­put the results in the Quick­time for­mat, which has built in VR capa­bil­i­ties (zoom in, zoom out, pan).

That said, have you ever cre­ated panoramic pho­tos and if so, what soft­ware did you use?