Panotour - Advanced - Stereoscopic Panoramas
Contents
Intro
Since Panotour Pro 2.5 a VR mode is available for your tours, offering a 2D side-by-side view of your panoramas for virtual reality headsets. True stereoscopic panoramas aren't supported in Panotour Pro yet, so this tutorial will show you the edits you need to do to enable stereoscopic panos in your virtual tours.
Two options will be presented:
- Stereoscopic images for the VR Mode (Option 1)
- Side-by-side images for the normal tour, useful for a before/after or night/day view (Option 2)
Requirements and Notes
- You need Panotour Pro to the edit the XML of your built tour.
- You need Panotour Pro 2.5 + to follow this tutorial.
- You have to be able to modify XML files. Although no knowledge of XML syntax is required for this tutorial, you need to have no fear of editing such files. The use of editors such as Notepad ++ or Sublimetext is recommended to view XML files clearly.
Building the tour will rewrite your edits. It is recommended that you backup the edited file(s) in case you make any edits to your project in Panotour, so you will only need to copy and paste the information back if it is accidentally rewritten.
Setting up the tour for Stereo
Your stereoscopic images must be two separate equirectangular images, not one joined image.
- Start a new project
- Input one pano, give the scene a name (example, Street)
- Input the second pano (which is your second eye and/or comparison panorama). Give it the same name, so only the panoID will differ between the two.
- If both files don't have the same name from the start of the project, the folders where their tiles are located will be different and this tutorial will not work. The scenes would have to be removed from the project to start over.
- Build the tour
- Remove the 2nd pano from the project (don't remove the image tiles from the built tour).
- Build the tour, and save the project.
Two panos, for my stereo-panorama or day/night comparison
Same name (stereo VR - case)
Same scene name (Day/Night or Before/After case)
Option 1 - In VR Mode
- Open Panotour Pro.
- Go to Edit > Open last exported project directory. This will open a file explorer to the last project your built.
- Edit YOURTOUR_vr.xml
- Scroll down to to the scene you want to switch to stereo by searching the file for your panorama's name or panoID.
- In the <image> tags, add stereo="true" stereolabels="P1|P2", where P1 and P2 are the panoID numbers of each pano.
- In my case it's 10 and 12. You'll see them at the end of the folder names, or find the panoID in Panotour by clicking on the blue (i) icon next to the panorama name.
- Change all the _P1 (in my case, _10) to _%t in the image urls. The higher resolution your image is the more lines you will have to edit.
Save and check your tour by launching it and entering VR mode.
Edit > Open last exported project
Open the YOURTOUR_vr.xml to edit it
Add the stereo parameters to the image tag
Switch the urls to %t
Result in VR Mode
Option 2 - In the default tour
- Open Panotour Pro.
- Go to Edit > Open last exported project directory. This will open a file explorer to the last project your built.
- Edit YOURTOUR.xml
- Go to the scene you want to s description by searching the file for your panorama's name or panoID.
- In the <image> tags, add stereo="true" stereolabels="P1|P2", where P1 and P2 are the panoID numbers of each pano.
- In my case it's 14 and 18. You'll see them at the end of the folder names, or find the panoID in Panotour by clicking on the blue (i) icon next to the panorama name.
- Change all the _P1 (in my case, _14) to _%t in the image urls. The higher resolution your image is the more lines you will have to edit.
- In the scene parameters of your stereo panorama, add onstart="set(display.stereo,true)"
- (OPTIONAL) If your project only contains the before/after panoramas, ignore this step. If you are including normal panoramas in the tour, you will have to edit the scene parameters of the normal panoramas, and add onstart="set(display.stereo,false)".
Save and check your tour by launching it.
Edit > Open last exported project
Open the YOURTOUR_vr.xml to edit it
Add the stereo parameters to the image tag and switch the urls to %t
Add the line to the scene parameters
Result
BACK TO: Documentation / Panotour Documentation