360 Snapshots
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Important: This is a project in active development, not yet a part of the standard viewer
Obviously, this page isn't complete... more stuff coming soon! |
The existing viewer snapshot system (control-shift-s) is being extended to add a mode where you can take a picture that encompasses all directions at once.
Placed in a suitable web site with some HTML and JavaScript, the image can then be scrolled to look around as though you had a window into Second Life at the moment the picture was taken.
This is also integrated with a number of other Snapshot improvements contributed by the author of the Black Dragon viewer.
- Typically there is lots of movement in a Second Life region. Clouds, animated objects, avatars etc. Right now, this movement can cause discontinuities in the image (because we actually take several separate pictures in sequence). We hope to be able to freeze everything while we take pictures, but this has not been done yet.
- The viewer interest list system only sends information about objects that are in your field of view. Objects outside this range are not sent or updated. This presents a problem when you are forcing the camera to look all around you while capturing the snapshots. We believe we can overcome this, but for the moment it helps to turn around and look in all directions slowly before taking the picture.
- The current viewer saves the resulting image to your local disk as a zip file; see below for how to view it. Before this becomes a standard viewer feature, we will provide ways for you to share the images.
Viewing Your Images
When this feature is complete, it will support ways for you to upload your images to different places to share them, as you can with conventional pictures now, but in the mean time...
We have assembled a web framework for viewing your images; it is available at the Bitbucket Repository
https://bitbucket.org/callum_linden/360-snapshot-web-viewer
If you are comfortable with using Mercurial, the best thing to do is to make a local clone of that repository.
A simpler way is to download and unzip a copy from:
https://bitbucket.org/callum_linden/360-snapshot-web-viewer/get/tip.zip
The contents of that directory should be placed in the content area of your web server (see below for how to create a temporary local server).
Add any new 360 image .zip files you save from the test viewer to the "shots" directory, and then access them:
Creating a temporary local server
To set up a local web server, you can use Python. If you have Python installed on your system, you can run a local server by setting your current directory to this one, and then running the command:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
It will serve the files in this directory so that you can browse them using a URL like:
http://localhost:8000/index.html?shot=shots/NAME.zip
where NAME is the name of the zip file you saved.
If you need Python for your system, go to https://www.python.org