Roger Williams
(K=86139) - Comment Date 4/27/2006
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This is the viewer mentioned in the donor forum. Note the alternative URL to the one given above:
http://www.fsoft.it/panorama/FSPViewer.htm
This is the home site of the gifted Italian programmer who created it. Sorry, Windows only...
This is NOT an Internet viewer, i.e., for viewing panoramas over the Internet. It is for panoramas you download or create yourself and view on your own computer. This program has very sophisticated interpolation algorithms and will make panoramas look good even if they do have rather fewer pixels than ideal, which is still often the case here at Usefilm. If you have a hardware graphic accelerator, this program can take advantage of it. It will also use your video RAM to give the best quality and smoothest imaging. On the other hand, it has VERY MODEST minimum requirements, and will work on old computers with much less than ideal parameters.
Do try it!
Roger Williams
PS Please post your experiences, I'd love to know how you get on with it.
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Matej Maceas
(K=24381) - Comment Date 4/30/2006
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When run full-screen, the image is quite pixelish. In order to achieve quality comparable to the full-size flat image (I've used your La Fete Tamagawa), the window needs to be very small, offering limited field of view. Is it supposed to do that? I'd expect full-screen mode to increase the field of view rather than "stretch" the photo...
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Roger Williams
(K=86139) - Comment Date 5/1/2006
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Matej, thank you for trying this.
I do not recommend you to use this viewer full screen, certainly not on the highly compressed images I have to upload to UF. It is better with pixel dimensions of about 600 x 600. But of course you can zoom in or out, making this 600 x 600 area correspond with an area as small or as large as you wish (or to the extent that pixelation will allow). Use the ZOOM keys (CTRL/SHIFT or A/Z). It's a bit jerky, but will allow to zoom to get an acceptable FOV (and definition) that you can then use to pan around within the image using the cursor arrows. La Fete Tamagawa is not the ideal image for this, because in trimming it for UF I removed rather more sky than foreground, so the horizon is not in the middle of the image. The viewer assumes that it WILL be in the middle (which is reasonable for 360 x 180-degree immersive panoramas), and there is therefore some bowing of the true horizon. If you can see an image which has width to height of 2:1, then it will be a full, untrimmed image, and will work properly (because the horizon will necessarily be in the center if it is straight). Also ones that are shallower but have the horizon in the center. There is a variable that can be set in the scripting language for FSPViewer, which is expressed as a percentage of the vertical height at which the true horizon in located. The default is 50%. If the vertical height is 400 pixels and the horizon is at 300, then this value would have to be set to 75%. But how many people will want to bother with this? [g] Do give it a good try, as the interpolation algorithm is a thing of beauty and gives good quality screen images!
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Roger Williams
(K=86139) - Comment Date 5/1/2006
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Be warned, everybody. If you click on "help," it takes you to a pop-up that just says "About FSPViewer." THIS, when you click on it, takes you to the help. Things like how to use A and Z keys (or CTRL and SHFT) to zoom in and zoom out. I have suggested to the author that he make this kind of basic, essential help accessible via a single click and not hide it behind what looks like an author/date/version number pop-up. By the way, the present version comes up as a full-screen display, which is not good used with the size images possible on UF. I suggest you use the Windows resize function to make it a much smaller window about 600 x 600 pixels. This gives you a much better feeling for VR panoramas.
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