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Fisheye Viewer

The fieldOfView Fisheye Viewer is a free tool for quickly reviewing or inspecting single fisheye shots.

While panorama photographers may get used to looking through fisheye lenses, the Fisheye Viewer is ideal for those who do not regularly 'read' these distorted images. The viewer can offer a client at a panorama shoot an almost instant impression of what the final panorama will be like, what will be visible in the panorama, etc.

The viewer is provided free of charge.
    Windows   MacOS X
0.6   209 Kb   (not yet)

System requirements:

The Fisheye Viewer is based on the same technology as our SPi-V engine, and shares most of its requirements.

  • Windows 98 or newer
  • Macromedia Shockwave plugin*
  • Recent video card (16 Mb or more)**
  • Display set to 32 bit for best performance
*: The current version of the fisheye viewer requires Shockwave 8.5
**: The viewer will work without a supported 3d accellerator, but may not perform very well

How to use

The Fisheye Viewer depends on a (simple configuration
file, with the following format:
[image]
hfov=189
diameter = 1423
offset = 273, 71
roll = 0
sharpen = true
 
[viewer]
meshresolution = 18
antialias = true


Horizontal FOV of the image in degrees
Diameter of the fisheye circle in pixels *
Upper left corner of the circle in pixels *
Camera roll in degrees (eg 90 or -90)
Sharpen image (3*3 convolution matrix)


Resolution of the generated mesh **
Bilinear filtering ***

*: For full frame fisheye shots, the diameter
and offset fields should be left blank.
**: The higher this number, the more accurate
the mesh. This will cause less distortion in
the image, but may negatively influence
performance.
***: Bilinear filtering makes the panorama
smoother, especially when zoomed in. Some
may percieve this smoothing as blurring.

Fisheye photos can be dropped either on the Fisheye Viewer's icon or window.

If you use only one type of image (eg Coolpix FE1 shots) making a single configuration file with the name 'fev.ini' will suffice. You can however make seperate configuration files for seperate types of photos (eg FE1.ini and FE2.ini for circular and full frame fisheye shots). You can specify which configuration to use by dropping the respective file along with your fisheye photos.

You can make 'droplets' on your desktop by making a shortcut to the viewer like pictured above.

The fisheye clause

Q: How does this viewer relate to patents in the field of panoramic imaging (such as those held by Ford Oxaal and IPIX)?

A: First, we hope that these parties realise that this viewer doesn't compete with the products that they provide. None of these parties offer a quick previewer of single fisheye shots.

Second, the fisheye viewer - like the SPi-V engine - uses a method that is different from that proposed in most panoramic patents. These patents describe interactively extracting a view from a panoramic image. Our viewer however wraps the panoramic image (a fisheye shot) to a piece of geomtery (using a technique called UV mapping). A virtual camera then looks at this object. The combination of UV-mapped geometry and interactively rendered images from a virtual camera predates any of the respective patents.