THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: How about having an interactive real time 360 degree look of your favourite church or beach in one photograph?
The new-age photography technique, Virtual Reality (VR) Photography, allows one to have an interactive real life experience featuring a continuous 360-degree view of a place in one VR photograph (a VR photograph is a wide photographic image encompassing an entire spherical view). In short, a virtual tour of one’s favourite destinations.
VR photography is the art of capturing a complete scene as a single image. The view is provided from a single central position. Viewers can look around in all directions, including from behind, and can zoom in and out.
“When we look around, we stop and pause as we see something that captures our interest. We also walk closer to something if we want to examine it further. All these actions can be performed in a VR photograph. We can see the roof of the building as if we are looking at it lying on the ground,’’ said Leen Thobias, a professional photographer, who is, arguably, the first to practise this technology in Kerala.
“Normally, a VR photograph is created by stitching together a number of photographs taken in a multi-row 360 degree rotation using special softwares. The final digital image, known as a VR Panorama, is viewed through an interactive software interface,’’ said Leen, who was in the city for the last three days to do VR photography for some real estate firms.
A VR photograph allows one to see the spatial relationship between locations, which we normally do when looking around wherever we are standing. The viewer is at the centre of a virtual cylinder or sphere and can rotate the image horizontally and vertically.
According to Leen, the locations that can successfully use VR photography to entice in-person visits include tourist destinations, residential and commercial real estate properties, spas, hotels, conference centres, auditoriums, museums, shopping malls, schools and restaurants.
“With VR photographs, the website visitors can see the facility top to bottom and side-to-side. Imagine the difference in effect, when the visitors go on a virtual tour of the light-filled reception hall rather than seeing a flat photograph. The ever-increasing data speeds of internet connections now allow creation of higher resolution full-screen images with much more detail in the websites,’’ Leen said.
Leen, hailing from Kottayam, has already created panoramic images of many prime locations, including Velankanni church and Kudajadri. A number of VR photographs of important monuments in Kerala and neighbouring states are available on his website www.p4panorama.com.
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