Design and implementation of panoramic movie system by using commodity 3D graphics hardware

We introduce a new deign approach of panoramic movie system. The system, named PanoVi by the authors, captures a 360-degree surround movie from a viewpoint by using four wide-angle video cameras, then the video streams are encoded as a single stream of standard video format. At the viewing side, geometric correction and image mosaicking are performed in real-time by using commodity 3D graphics accelerator hardware equipped with personal computers. By mapping the mosaic on the inside wall in 3D space, the viewing system renders a partial view of arbitrary direction as a virtual environment. This approach is suitable for real-time transmission of a panoramic movie because this system uses a standard video format in transmission layers. We developed a prototype system based on Windows and DirectX8 environments. We confirmed full-rate interactive panoramic movie playback on commodity Pentium4 based PCs.