Presenting panoramic images as a movie – ie without them being interactive – often proves difficult as it involves tedious video editing to allow seamless blends. It also tends to simply look like a standard movie, losing the concept of stitched images and photo globes.
Admittedly there is not often a need to show panoramas as movie clips, as they are meant to be interactive, but in our case we need to produce an illustration of moving between panoramas while retaining a sense of immersion.
As such we have turned to thoughts previously part of the ’30 Days in ActiveWorlds’ research of ‘Worlds within Worlds’ (the concept is pictured above). Creating a series of ‘Worlds within Worlds’ alows a number of panoramas to be combined and ‘stepped’ into whenever the user wishes.
The images above and below illustrate a rough draft of this concept. Rendered in 3DMax we have a series of sub-worlds enclosed in the Greater London Authorities debating chamber.
This allows a smooth camera path into and out of each panoramaic globe, illustrating the concept of interlinked scenes and immersion. The best way to understand the idea of ‘Worlds within Worlds’ is to view the draft movies via the links below, any comments would be most welcome.
The draft movie can be viewed here – highly optimised (14.7Mb, 7 minutes runtime) and here – high quality (63.9Mb, 7 minutes runtime). Note the movie uses the DIVX codec, details are on our main movie page