Lake Minnetonka Regional Park

We stayed in the city this weekend. Mostly because we have another long weekend coming up this Friday, so we have a short week coming. Margaret also had a work event she attended on Saturday. More on the GNC now the Garden House coming next week.

Most of Saturday I messed around creating Virtual Reality Panoramas. What's a VR Panorama you say?

Long story: here

Short story: It is many photographs magically stitched together to create an image bigger than the camera is capable of taking. The final image in my last post was a panorama created from multiple camera images while standing on the end of the dock at the lake.

There is really about 15 pictures that make up this image. They are stitched together with a special program. You can see some issues in this image if you look closely there is a ghost image of the dock next to the dock on the right hand side. This is created by misalignment in the original images called Parralex error. There is a special device that corrects for this, and I didn't have it when I snapped the photos from the dock.

It is possible to create a simulated 3 dimensional circle of these images. The trick is to take enough pictures and to get them to stitch together properly. It takes a special attachment to a tripod to get the images to be close enough and properly aligned to work well and avoid the Parallex error above. I bought one of those attachments Saturday and played with it all afternoon. I did a couple of practice tries and had fairly good results.

Sunday around 11:00AM we went to Minnetonka regional park for a picnic and a hike. I also put together this Panorama of the very interesting pool area they have at the park.

Instructions for use:

Pressing the shift button will zoom you in.

Pressing the ctrl button will zoom you out.

Clicking on the left mouse button while dragging on the image will cause the image to move in the direction of the mouse movement. Up Down, Right, and Left

You also have to have Flash running on you computer. Most people do, but if it doesn't appear to work you can get flash installed by clicking on the word here

Its almost like being there!

Let me know though comments what you thing about the Panoramas.

P.S. If you zoom in on the picnic table that is back near the trees you can see Margaret sleeping on the bench of the table.