Summary and Setup

Digitisation with spherical panorama photo (photosphere)

Equipment

For spherical panorama capturing and processing you will need the following equipment:

Digital specialized spherical camera: There are different commercial cameras for capturing spherical panorama images, however it is preferable to use a well-established brand that specializes in spherical cameras for high-resolution imaging. Some of the brands that offer professional products are:

Professional (stereo and mono):
- Insta360 Pro, Pro2, Titan
- Meta Camera System
- Kandao Obsidian Pro, Obsidian R, Obisdian S,Obsidian GO
- Matterport Pro3, Pro2
Commercial (stereo and mono):
- The list of commercial cameras that capture spherical panorama photos and video (stereo and mono) is fairly extensive. Comprehensible list can be found at the Matterport website which also offers a range of other solutions and software.
Tripod must be used because spherical panorama photo shooting needs to be stable otherwise stitching errors may occur.

Software

For this tutorial you will need access to:

Insta360 Pro 2 Shooting App
Image processing software Raw Therapee for batch converting raw images.
Stitching Software

Every camera has its software for processing and stitching images. For this workshop, we will use the Insta360 Pro 2 Control App and Stitcher. There are other proprietary and free software available which can import different formats used from a range of cameras. Here are some of them that you can use to stitch spherical panorama photographs:
- PTGui
- Hugin (Panotools)
- Panoramastudio
- Gigapan
- PTAssembler - orthogonal non spherical

Spherical panorama viewers (hosted or self-hosted

You can view spherical panorama photographs as flat distorted images such as the one above. However, to be able to interactively rotate images you will need special viewers such as Pannellum Online or self-hosted.

Examples Data Sets

For this workshop we are going to use data captured from the practical session and the already captured data hosted on our D4Science repository You can download the full data set as well as having a quick preview of the final result. This is achieved by copying the link of each image onto the Pannellum spherical panorama viewer like the example below.

First try to experiment by Right-clicking on one of the images and copy the image URL address into the URL box of the viewer


Photo1 DATA SET	Photo2 DATA SET	Photo3 DATA SET	Photo4 DATA SET	Photo5 DATA SET	Photo6 DATA SET


Photo7 DATA SETS	Photo 8 DATA SET	Photo9 DATA SET	Photo10 DATA SET	Photo11 DATA SET	Photo12 DATA SET

Photos of St Mary’s Roman Catholic Church Brighton (UK), DSVMC University of Brighton, under DSVMC, via D4Science

Details

For this lesson, you will need:

Access to some paper and pen.
Install the software mentioned above on this page.
Download the data sets included above.
Access to the Culture Digital Skills Virtual Research Environment D4Science is also required. If you have not registered, it would be useful to do so before the lesson. For more information, see instructions

The tutorial is built with The Carpentries Workbench, as part of the training activities of the AHRC-funded network service on Digital Skills in Visual and Material Culture.