pannellum – Matthew Petroff

Pannellum 2.5

Matthew Petroff — Sun, 14 Jul 2019 01:58:28 +0000

Pannellum 2.5 has now been released. As with Pannellum 2.4, this was a rather incremental release. The most noteworthy change is that equirectangular panoramas will now be automatically split into two textures if too big for a given device, which means images up to 8192 px across, covering all consumer panoramic cameras, now have widespread support. There has also been a significant improvement of the rendering quality on certain mobile devices (the fragment shaders now use highp precision), and support for partial panoramas has improved. Finally, there are an assortment of more minor improvements and bug fixes. See the changelog for full details. Pannellum also now has a Zenodo DOI (and a specific DOI for each new release).

Pannellum 2.4

Matthew Petroff — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 21:14:03 +0000

Yesterday, I released Pannellum 2.4.0. It doesn’t contain any major new features, although it does finally include translation support, which was an often requested feature. Also included are numerous minor improvements, a few new API functions, and quite a few bug fixes; see the changelog for full details. It had been more than a year since the last release—and I’ve been meaning to create a new release for a few months—so it was high time for a new release.

Pannellum 2.3

Matthew Petroff — Sun, 30 Oct 2016 18:35:14 +0000

With eight months elapsed since the release of Pannellum 2.2, it was time to release a new version of Pannellum. Actually, the release was well past due considering the plethora of bugfixes since the previous release, but there was a bug blocking the release, and it took me a while to find time to fix it. Now that I fixed the bug, I was able to release Pannellum 2.3 today. The major new feature in the release is support for the device orientation API such that panoramas can be explored on mobile devices by moving the device itself; this involved adding some quaternion-based calculations to determine where the device was pointing and extending viewer roll support to the cubemap and multi-resolution renderers.¹ The other area that saw considerable improvement was the API, with an events framework and numerous new methods added. However, the bulk of the changes were small, consisting of a number of minor improvements and dozens of bugfixes. For a more complete list of improvements, see the changelog.

Roll was already supported in the equirectangular renderer to handle Ricoh Theta S images. ↩

Pannellum 2.2

Matthew Petroff — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 02:42:26 +0000

After a little over a year of work, I’ve just released Pannellum 2.2.0. New features in this release include an experimental API, instead of just a standalone viewer, for better integration with external code; support for the PosePitchDegrees and PoseRollDegrees XMP tags, as used by the Ricoh Theta S; an optional fade animation for tour transitions; and a debug parameter to assist with placing hot spots. Noteworthy improvements include vastly improved equirectangular video support, high-DPI display support, and unification of regular and tour configuration files. Finally, there are numerous bug-fixes.

Previously, equirectangular videos were sort of supported, but the user experience was terrible, as there were no playback controls. Pannellum is a panorama viewer of course, not a video player, so I didn’t want to write my own video player nor did I want to build it into Pannellum—this is where the new API comes in. Instead, I wrote a Video.js plug-in that uses Pannellum to render the video; this achieves the objective of a fully-featured equirectangular video player without actually having to write a video player.

I would have created a new release sooner, but I didn’t want to release yet another version without much in the way of documentation, specifically examples. At the beginning of December, I received the Ricoh Theta S I had pre-ordered, allowing me to quickly shoot a variety of panoramas¹ to use with examples—this is when my push to write documentation started in earnest. To this end, I converted pannellum.org from using Jekyll to using Hugo, as it better suited the documentation effort (and moved it to a dedicated repository). I then wrote examples, integrated the existing configuration parameter documentation, and added the new API documentation. Finally, I created a Pannellum CDN and integrated a configuration generator to allow one to easily display CORS-hosted panoramas (e.g. hosted with Imgur).

As always, report bugs on the GitHub issue tracker.

Actually, they’re all of Baltimore near my apartment or of the area around San Pedro de Atacama, Chile where I’m currently working. ↩

Pannellum 2.1

Matthew Petroff — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 03:34:01 +0000

Over the past five months, I have continued working on Pannellum and just released version 2.1.0. This release includes a number of improvements including a loading bar for equirectangular panoramas, “inertia,” configuration from Photo Sphere XMP data, more descriptive error messages, and more documentation. The loading bar is something I’ve wanted since the beginning but never had a good way of implementing before, since Image objects don’t have progress events. To add support for using Photo Sphere XMP data, I needed access to raw data that wasn’t available with Image objects. Researching that, I learned that XMLHttpRequest Level 2 supports blob objects that allow the raw image to be transfered; before, it was possible but was a bad idea as it involved some ugly character code hacks. This extended functionality is a few years old at this point, but since the name didn’t change, plenty of information sources are out of date. Configuration from Photo Sphere XMP data seems to work, but without an Android device capable of making them, I was not able to test a number of corner cases. The improved error messages should hopefully resolve one of the most commonly reported issues, why a large panorama doesn’t work, since it now explicitly says that the image is too big and lists what the device’s largest supported image size is. Also of note, I changed the naming of a few configuration parameters for consistency; this breaks some existing configurations, but it will be better going forward. Lastly, numerous bugs were also fixed.