2.5D – REZ’ 08

My summer holidays ended last week in Kortrijk, Belgium. While I’m not at all an audio guy I was selected for REZ’ 08 (dutch explanation), part of the Happy New Ears festival.

In short REZ’ 08 invited 5 students to create and present new work during a two week period of the festival. We got 3 old houses at our disposal where we choose rooms to work in. The goal of the residence program is to to gain experience and meet professional artists. (We had lunch and diner together with all the artists of the festival + all-access to the installations, performances and concerts.)

This is part of my research on movement in space and new ways to represent this. It is essentially a series of 360° panoramas following a path through a space. These spherical images are converted to an angular projection, which introduces a typical distortion. The further you get away from the center, the more distortion. The center of the image is determined by 3 parameters: pan, tilt en roll. I animated these parameters resulting in a sense of movement and deformation of the space.

Following is the clip that was shown during the weekend exhibition. It’s pretty rough cause it’s more a proof of concept than a finished product. There are many things that could improved to increase the effect, so many in fact that I’ll be writing them all down in a separate post (coming soon).

2.5D – Polar Panoramic Video from Valentijn Kint on Vimeo.

2.5D – Polar Panoramic Video (download as .mov file)

A short explanation if you don’t know anything about 360° panoramas.

What you see is an image that shows everything you can see from a certain point in space. So an image that combines everything you see in front of you plus everything behind you. This is achieved by taking multiple photographs at every angle using a tripod and a rotating head. These images are then stitched together and the tripod you see in the resulting image is removed in photoshop.

General rundown of the process involved in the making of the clip.

I started my project with the initial idea to do a better executed rework of the Gods View project. Compared to my Canon S2 I used back then, I used my new Canon 40D + 10-22mm lens. So much less photographs to create a panorama + no freakin’ shutterlag.

During some indoor tests I discovered the shadows at the intersection of the walls gave a nice 3d feel to the polar panoramas.

So I decided to do a short walk through the house. Because the staircase and the hall were so small I had to manually add controlpoints on every panorama. This limited the total panoramas I could make within the two-week timeframe and thus the total duration of the clip.

I used pano2vr to create the angular (= polar or little planet) projection. To make the clip longer and more interesting I animated the center of the frame by varying the pan and tilt parameters.
As the pano2vr project file is essentially .xml, I could use processing to generate a batch file that would generate all the frames for each panorama. To achieve the natural motion I used an implementation of the penner equations by Jezus Gollonet. I had to tweak it cause it didn’t calculate some values correctly. Didn’t really know why so I hacked my way trough it. It was just me who was using it incorrectly. I used it like tweener and gave it an input of start & end while Gollonets library has start & change as input, hence the wrong calculation results.

Update 1

I also did a short test with the same technique on the equirectangular projection.

Equirectangular Panoramic Video (download the .mov file)

Some technical details

• 50 individual panoramas along a path at a 20cm interval or 1 stair
• Stitching using PTGui
• Remapping using pano2vr
• Creating pano2vr project file with processing
• 055 PROB Manfrotto Tripod
• Nodal Ninja 2 Panoramahead
• Canon 40D + Canon 10-22mm
• Compositing using After Effects
• Pinching using AE Bulge effect

Thank you!

Thank you Joost for inviting me to the festival, and Esther from the Audiowerkplaats providing me with lots of feedback during the process.

Tags: equirectangular, events, panoramas, processing

5 Responses to “2.5D – REZ’ 08”

1. jesús gollonet says:

   September 29, 2008 at 10:12

   Hey Valentijn. Nice project!

   I’m curious to hear the problems you had with the equations. To be honest I haven’t used them lately, but I haven’t discovered any major problem when using them.

   Best!
   Jesús.
2. VKNT says:

   September 30, 2008 at 00:46

   Thanks!
   In the end I had to rush to get the project done for the opening, so it’s possible that I used the library incorrectly. I’ll do some tests, and drop you a mail.
3. Create Digital Motion » Polar Views of Video: Fodder for 3D, Pixel Bender Effects? says:

   October 2, 2008 at 03:51

   [...] Speaking of Adobe’s new Pixel Bender, VKNT writes about work he’s doing with polar views, as modified in an application that processes panoramic images called Pano2VR. It’s not a real-time process, in this case (though the finished result is built in Processing), but I don’t see why you couldn’t do some filter math in something like Pixel Bender or a conventional OpenGL filter that would do the same live. Could be fun stuff. VKNT writes: This is part of my research on movement in space and new ways to represent this. It is essentially a series of 360° panoramas following a path through a space. These spherical images are converted to an angular projection, which introduces a typical distortion. The further you get away from the center, the more distortion. The center of the image is determined by 3 parameters: pan, tilt en roll. I animated these parameters resulting in a sense of movement and deformation of the space. More info and downloadable .mov file at: vknt.be/2008/09/25/25d-happy-new-ears-rez-08/ [...]
4. jesús gollonet says:

   October 2, 2008 at 17:46

   hahaha, now my honor has been restored :)
   cheers!
   jesús.
5. VKNT » » 2.5D Follow-up says:

   October 6, 2008 at 00:19

   [...] Contact « 2.5D – REZ’ 08 [...]