This 360 degree full spherical panorama will start to spin on it's own once it has completed loading. You can control the direction and spin by holding your (left) mouse button down while dragging it across the picture, left, right, up or down. Note: for this to work properly the panorama must have completed loading (ie. be starting to spin by itself). Patience is a virtue ;-)
Clicking on the ZOOM button will open a control bar that will let you zoom in and out, resume panning (the arrows), reset to initial view, show hotspots (if any) and visit the Viewers home page (http://www.livepicture.com/). This great little free Java viewer from Live Picture takes panoramas to a wider audience!
The image used in this sample is a relatively low resolution 267K jpeg file. Higher resolutions are easily obtained, but will incur additional file download times.
Caution: while this Java version has been successfully tested on Windows (95/98), Unix and Macintosh systems, the Java language itself is still relatively new, patchy in it's implementation and may crash your Browser - especially if you get impatient and try to rush things ;-) The Java applet does not appear to run properly at all under Windows 3.1 although it tries, and MacOS <7.6 does not seem to have Java capabilities (no Apple MRJ for Java support >:-(.
Because we CAN! Some poorly informed people may try to tell you there is only one way to create a full spherical panorama, one that let's you look all the way up and down, and you have to pay them for every panorama you make. Let me show you how wrong that approach can be. This small sample illustrates how a little stubborn ingenuity and the marvelous talents and skills of the developer community can pull together to do (almost) anything!
This page could not have been done without contributions from our international VR community, and the following people I would like to thank:
This 360 degree full spherical panorama was inspired by Helmut Dersch (Germany), his wonderful Panorama Tools, Pete's independent tutorial (New Zealand), and the abuse and persecution Helmut (and others in the VR community) have suffered at the hands of certain predatory parties.
Please note: no fish, fish's eye, or fisheye lens was harmed in the production of this panorama. In fact, no fisheye lens was used at all (take that you know who and stick it up yer jumper!).