Immersive visions. Some paradigm a of an exceeding iconography. Capture and monitoring by spherical cameras and interactive smartglasses

Abstract

A series of geometric and visual researches—originated from centuries by the need of cartographic and cosmographic planispheres reached up to the analogical graphics of the recent twentieth century drawing works of M. C. Escher have patiently elaborated the hermeneutics of a visual culture and consequent technology that makes us today the customary language used for digital spherical cameras. At the same time, the virtual reality interactive viewers, or augmented reality smartglasses, allow us to access, trough functional metadata, the digital files of 360° spherical images with the same gestural immersiveness of environmental orientation usually used to orientate us in real spaces. After some complex prototype, are now available some prosumer models of qualified spherical cameras, and even other hi-level multicamera systems. The performances of the softwares recently developed for the matching of this kind of panoramic pictures are progressively improving, even in form of app for smartphone cameras. After hundreds of shootings on the field, in this manuscript are described some case studies about interiors of architecture (indoor) and open and complex urban landscapes (outdoor), exemplifying the more appropriate management of perception of circular perspective for the architectural immersive representation, even to represent complex contexts in the simple and flat rectangular panoramic format. The technical debate highlight how in our visual culture is going to be progressively accepted a paradigm a of an exceeding digital iconography that include not only a linear perspective, but even a spherical representation of the full surrounding visual space: a point of view, even metaphorically, centered on the value of the observer: standing between the micro and the cosmic dimensions, and in the fulcrum of Science and Art.