articles/Review/hugin-page3
by Mike McNamee Published 01/04/2013
Wikipedia
The characteristic that caught our eye was the ability of the Pannini Projection to capture very wide angle of view while retaining straight verticals and horizontal lines. It is also available in PTGui as the 'vedutismo' projection, equivalent to the variable eye-distance cylindrical projection in Pannini.*
* Pannini: A New Projection for Rendering Wide Angle Perspective Images Thomas K. Sharpless, Bruno Postle and Daniel M. German; International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics, London, June 2010
Before we describe the workings of the software it is worth relating it to the previous article. There we established that quality obtained from large numbers of narrow field angle shots trumps other methods. This is particularly true when the image is presented as an immersive, web panorama which can be zoomed to display really fine details of crowd scenes. Getting this out onto a flat sheet of paper is a problem that has exercised the minds of map-makers for centuries. Many distortions are required in either depiction of size or shape or area of a landmass and the same is true of a panorama projected onto a sheet (this btw is why the famous Mercator map projection is offered by Hugin). It is unlikely that very wide-angled panoramas made with short focal length lenses can be crunched up with the same level of detail-fidelity that may be achieved with shots made up from, say, telephoto lenses. You only have to use the 'Move/Drag' interface of Hugin to realise just how many pixel and shape transformations you can create! Even so, all that we have said about panoramas remains true, they have commercial value because of their intrinisic detail and the ability to draw the viewer in, especially at wall sizes.
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