Circular projection of the entire Globe
Michel THOBY
I have devised what I think is a nice way in which no other projection would better and realistically show the Earth image apparent evolution during a one year cycle: the whole globe is visible and, without spin, the continents have more or less a "familiar" appearance and shape viewed from space.
Flash object movie; Caveat lector for 3.4 MB (!) download:
http://tinyurl.com/ydmcvqo
Additional comments:
Circular is nowadays probably the most frequent projection for *inputting* source images (i.e. both for "circular" and "full frame" fisheye settings) in most of the current stitching applications.
For some valid reasons and unlike equirectangular, the circular projection is rarely selected to *output* panoramas while this output projection -among many other alternatives- is readily available from PTGui when it is not from most -if not all- the competitors. Thanks to Joost.
A full 3D spherical view (also commonly called 360° x 180°) can be nevertheless represented in 2D by a 360° x 360° circular panorama. BTW that is strictly equivalent to the popular 360° x 180° equirectangular panorama image when in both cases, the paired figures are respectively for HFOV and VFOV values, although circular cropping is optionally required to get rid of redundant extraneous pixels produced by PTGui in the former case.
A set of six rectilinear 90° X 90° "cubic" faces is moreover one of the favorite alternative output formats to equirectangular but AFAIK it isn't yet directly supported by PTGui.
Michel Thoby
Roger D. Williams
I don't get colour for the entire flash sequence, though. It persists in
being monochrome for most of the year (Opera on Vista 32 bit).
We in Japan usually put Japan plum in the middle and push Europe off to
the side. I see you return the compliment by pushing Japan out of sight!
It would be nice if the animation could be in two senses, one a rotation
of the world itself and the other showing the seasonal changes, perhaps
by dragging the mouse vertically for the latter, leaving the horizontal
drag to function as it normally would to rotate the world.
But I fear this would be more than usually counter-intuitive. <sad smile>
Roger W.
On Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:17:59 +0900, Michel THOBY <thoby...@wanadoo.fr>
wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I have devised what I think is a nice way in which no other projection
> would better and realistically show the Earth image apparent evolution
> during a one year cycle: the whole globe is visible and, without spin,
> the continents have more or less a "familiar" appearance and shape
> viewed from space.
>
> Flash object movie; Caveat lector for 3.4 MB (!) download:
> http://tinyurl.com/ydmcvqo
--
Business: www.adex-japan.com
Pleasure: www.usefilm.com/member/roger
Ken Warner
that cycles through a set of different sea surface temps for two weeks
but can't find it now.
Erik Krause
> I have devised what I think is a nice way in which no other
> projection would better and realistically show the Earth image
> apparent evolution during a one year cycle: the whole globe is
> visible and, without spin, the continents have more or less a
> "familiar" appearance and shape viewed from space.
>
> Flash object movie; Caveat lector for 3.4 MB (!) download:
> http://tinyurl.com/ydmcvqo
Now this is *really* fascinating! The moving of the green regions is
very interesting. Only "Planet Earth" DVDs have similar but for limited
regions of the earth only...
--
Erik Krause
http://www.erik-krause.de