What means of publishing and viewing photo-panoramas exist for those who do not use the services of external hosting?

No doubt: Gigapan , 360 Cities , ViewAt - all these are not bad global collections and hosting for the photo panoramas for publication and viewing by everyone. Many of us have learned about the merits of 360 Cities, looking at the eighty-gigapixel panorama of London ; In addition, 360 Cities panoramas five days ago were included in the Google Earth photo layer. Selected panoramas from Gigapan are shown in a separate layer in Google Earth; Another advantage of Gigapan is a flash demonstrator of multi-megapixel and even multi-pixel photos, which can be placed free on other sites and boosts the enlarged image as needed (just like Google Maps or Google Earth boosts its detailed satellite photos). This is a clear advantage compared to the 360 ​​Cities website (which requires payment for placing panoramas outside non-commercial websites) and with the ViewAt photo player (which first boosts the entire panorama from the Web, and only then begins to show it).

But I gathered you to talk about something else: probably, there are such similar means for demonstrating the photo-panoramas used by the photographer who wants to place the photo-panoramas on his own website instead of external hosting? Or (which is about the same thing) such means that the business uses: a museum, or an art gallery, or some store — willing to place a photo-panoramic exhibition of its goods on the Internet?

What is this money? How is the viewer organized on the site, how is the photo material organized for viewing and for uploading as needed? Are there open, free, or at least free, ready-made solutions for this purpose? And if there is no open and free, then what are the paid?
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I still do not have such a good answer to these questions that would suit me perfectly. I suggest, however, to review more than a dozen of the solutions I have come across; perhaps the Habrahabr community will fill in the gaps in my research.

It was logical to start the research with the three large photo hosting sites listed above. Unfortunately, only ViewAt of them honestly admits which panorama player it uses: it is a Flash Panorama Player , the price of which is ≈40 €. The main disadvantage of this option appears immediately: the source data for it is prepared as six faces of a cubic projection and everything is pumped up completely (at least on ViewAt I had to look at the progress bar with percentages first, and only then at the panorama). Probably not the best option.

A simple googling in the phrase “360 panorama” makes it easy to find a product 360 Panorama Lite (≈ $ 50). It’s clear on his website, however, that the author used some special substances, because the page started for health (“... without the need for plugins”) continues for the rest (“... are looking for a java panorama viewer ...”; But everyone knows that Java is a plugin, and even quite weighty, so launching it rarely takes less than a few seconds).

In approximately the same way, FirmTools Panorama Composer (at a cost of ≈ $ 30 ), supporting the QuickTime VR format, is browsing . This old and respectable format, as far as I understood it, is generally quite popular among programs that create photo panoramas (take at least PTGui ); However, this format involves the creation of a single .MOV file that will be downloaded entirely from the Web. Throwing a multi - megapixel panorama there (for example, 20000 × 5000 pixels) would mean asking for the unpleasant feeling of all those viewers who have neither patience nor an unlimited multi-megabit channel of communication with the Internet. (It’s no secret that many providers offer legal entities or cellular users such tariffs that you can’t call cheap, speedy or unlimited.) However, in favor of QTVR, you can at least say that this format does not require the viewer first downloaded the entire file, and then watched it; In any case, the Pano2VR program (at a price of ≈ € 60 ) promises “subtiling for progressive download”.

Recalling PTGui, it is appropriate to search panorama players in the links section of the PTGui website. First, the aforementioned Pano2VR is searched there, followed by the above-mentioned Flash Panorama Player, then - we have not yet considered krpano, PanoSalado and PTViewer.

The krpano panorama player costs € 90 - but it will require ≈300 € more from those who want to remove its name from the panorama player on its website. (I’ll say it right away: this name is displayed in the lower right corner of a rather unpleasant chopped italic, so I wouldn’t be surprised to want to pay four times for one not to see it.) The krpano engine has the ability to swap images according to need , including gradually increasing resolution; and there is an example . In general, it contains all the functions that are necessary for a good panoramic player, only they will cost more than all the options discussed above.

PanoSalado site is surprised by the story that its competitors are constantly trying to hack, so this remote control player has been transferred to the IVRPA wiki repository . Seeing this wiki, I did not find any documentation or program descriptions on it, but only hyperlinks for downloading the player and two additional funds to it (one for transforming a spherical equidistant projection into a cube development, and the other for cutting this cube into tiles ). And judging by the documentation that is downloaded in the archive along with the program, its source code is intended for compilation in SWF, accomplished by means of adobovskoy development flash movies. In this way, it resembles PAN ³⁶ O ^o RAMA from the “visicam Tools” suite — another open source that also needs to be compiled in Flash CS3 or in another similar tool. They are useless for those who are not versed in the development of Flash-movies and are not going to comprehend it.

PTViewer is not written in Flash, but in Java, so quick loading of the plugin, I suppose, will not work. This photopanel player, fortunately, supports cutting panoramas into pieces , but only in one resolution (so the only advantage will be the beginning of downloading from those elements that are in front of the viewer, with a gradual transition to those that are “behind the back” of the viewer).

If you continue to google, then a couple of freebies are found : FreePV (browser plug-in that can play cylindrical and cubic panoramas) and pan0 - a flash engine based on the famous Papervision3D , the only parameter of which is JPEG (equidistant projection of the sphere).

It is appropriate to consider the links section on the IVRPA website mentioned above. There, for example, the PURE Player panorama player is found , marked as free in the list of links. It may be free, but it only accepts files in a non-standard IVP format created by PURE STARTER TOOLKIT (at a cost of ≈ $ 35 ). Coarse bait.

In the same list, SPi-V (the engine based on Shockwave 3D , not to be confused with Flash) can be easily found, which can load photo-panoramas, understanding several projections (equidistant, cylindrical, cubic). Otherwise, it is not better than the above pan0, perhaps.

CubicVR 360 ° also deserves some attention. It accepts a photo panorama as six faces of a cube, as well as ViewAt (that is, Flash Panorama Player). But it doesn't cost a penny and starts working even before it downloads images from the Web (cube faces are pumped out sequentially, and a two-dimensional progress bar is displayed on the downloaded face), and also allows you to place clearly visible circles on the cube faces, which serve as hyperlinks, that is load the viewer with another cube or open some web page (which allows you to organize the so-called "virtual tours"). But even in this sweet honey barrel there is a fly in the ointment: the CubicVR 360 ° website emphasizes its flexibility with respect to the format of the faces of the cube (GIF, PNG, JPEG and SWF are supported), but not a word is said about the size of all six faces must be equal to each other and some integer power of two (faces of 128, 256, 512, 1024 and 2048 pixels are supported). Even more unpleasant is the fixed size of the player (384 × 258); The flash object, of course, can be enlarged, for example, exactly twice (up to 768 × 516) directly in HTML, but then all points will become squares 2 × 2 pixels, and this will not add to the beauty of the displayed photo.

A completely separate page in the history of displaying photo-panoramas are attempts to achieve the desired without any plug-ins at all - due to the modern hypertext markup technologies, as well as its styling and scripting. The most simple example of such an approach is jQuery Reel , which simply drags the background of an object to the left and to the right, responding to mouse pulling (as well as dragging a finger on the touch screen of a mobile phone or netbook). Such a movement that does not introduce geometric changes is suitable for demonstrating a planar (or, say, cylindrical) projection of a panorama — but it will not allow to demonstrate an area somewhat close to the zenith or nadir without distortion and discontinuities.

PanoramAh and jQuery version of PhotoNav Showcase are also very close to this example. However, they do not react to pulling, but to the position of the mouse over the image - it is easier for the viewer to detect this reaction, but when the mouse moves from one edge to another, the panorama is rotated only 360 ° (100% of the width), preventing it one turn and show loopback to the full.

PanoScroll allows the background to move in two dimensions, and it is looped horizontally (which is useful), as well as vertically (and this is unacceptable for a photo-panorama). The movement starts and stops with special buttons poked with the mouse; this solution is less ergonomic than in the previous examples.

The combination of the two aforementioned approaches is jQuery virtual tour , which provides both interactive movement (when the user drags the panorama with the mouse) and uniform (after clicking on the drawn buttons). An additional advantage is the support of active areas (defined using the standard <map> and <area> markup ).

The author of jQuery spherical panorama viewer made the only attempt I know to display a spherical panorama using javascript. Unfortunately, neither in Firefox 4 nor in IE8 I managed to get any visible results from his work, except for the “Loading ...” inscription, although an analysis of HTTP requests shows that a great many .jpg files are being downloaded from the Web - it should be individual dies constituting some large image.

Far ahead of her time was the idea to build a cubic panorama using 3D CSS transformations with jQuery and jQuery UI scripts, implemented in jqPanoramic ; therefore, it works only in WebKit.

John Dyer experimented by imparting spatial distortions with javascript along vertical columns to the image (as DooM programmers did many years ago); however, for speed, he was forced to make columns 5 pixels wide (this unpleasantly “breaks” horizontal lines), moreover, in the Ajaxian blog they write that these demos only worked in Firefox (even in Safari did not work).

I have it all; but if any reader remembers any tool that has not yet been mentioned above, I ask you to mention it immediately: maybe it will even be in something better than the above mentioned ones - in quality and (or) in price (for example, CubicVR 360 ° turned out to be freer, and partially even more sophisticated than Flash Panorama Player). And I immediately frankly admit that I didn’t want to come unprepared, so I specifically asked a question at Habrahabr in the “q & a” section and waited two weeks, but no one answered me there. So, if you call another viewer for photopans, it will not be new to me alone. Feel free to call.