Walk-able and stereo virtual tour based on spherical panorama matrix

Abstract

Photo based panoramas were widely used to make realistic virtual tour for existed scenes, but traditional panorama could only allow users to look around the scene from a fixed point where it was shot, while traditional panorama could not provide binocular stereo effect that is very common for a virtual reality head mounted display. We could walk freely in a modeling based virtual tour scene, but there are great difficulties in modeling an existed scene and making it look real. In this paper, we developed a panorama matrix based virtual tour system which could provide freely walk through ability and binocular stereo effect, by recording an existed scene using spherical panorama camera and shot in every walkable space in the scene by rows and columns, then the panoramas will be mapped and aligned on a virtual sphere and exported to head mounted displays to provide immersive experience to users.