A Low-Cost Method for Generating Panoramic Views for a Mobile Virtual Heritage Application

Nowadays, with rapid advancement of technology, people can roam around the virtual world through the aid of the Internet. One of these advances is a photographic technique called panoramic view where images are captured with elongated field of view using specialized software or equipments. However, the computational cost of generating a panoramic view is high. One of the popular software for generating panoramic views is Apple Inc.’s QuickTime VR (QTVR). Nevertheless, iPhone Operating System (iOS) does not support the existing QTVR software. Therefore, in this paper, a low-cost method for generating panoramic views on mobile platform is proposed by storing finite images in an array in order to generate a 360o panoramic view. This method can be supported by all kinds of platform and therefore can be installed in any mobile devices without having to use any intermediate software to convert the format of the images. The outcome is a cylindrical panoramic view that allows the user to gain a 360o clear vision around historical monuments in a mobile virtual heritage exploration using lower computational cost but with similar quality of production.