An Explorable Immersive Panorama

The immersive panoramas are widely used to provide virtual tours of real scene. Their use covers a wide field of applications: art, industry, space research, topography, forensic investigation and all those systems requiring the exploration of a virtual environment which simulates a real one. Often sophisticated devices are used to perform the panorama acquisition. In this paper, we present an image based immersive panorama requiring low cost devices for the acquisition task and provides an innovative human-computer interaction approach. Many panoramic images of the same location are captured. The visualization system changes the panorama in a transparent way with respect to the user interaction in function of the position of the virtual point of view. Indeed, the new and more detailed panorama is loaded each time the current point of view position corresponds to a point of acquisition. Our solution is particularly suited to tele-immersive software environments, because it is lighter than a full 3D scene, but the user can lives a full exploration experience of a scene.