Microsoft Research Community

Among the not-exactly-documented features of WWT is the ability to load your own images to view as panoramas.

For an example, consider the Summit Panorama from the NASA/JPL Mars Exploration Rover Spirit.

Click on the image (or right click and 'Save Target As') to get a 4096 x 2048 jpeg (600k), or click here for a 8192 x 4096 version (2Mb).

Now, using the "Look At" menu in the bottom left of WWT, choose Panoramas->Browse

This pops up a dialog box where you can enter the file you want to upload. Try the 4096 x 2048 version before you try the 8192 x 4096 version. (And yes, you can also load image formats other than jpeg.)

This should, after a few seconds, display the image in the WWT display window. There will be distortion at the 'poles' since we are using equirectangular projection instead of WWT's usual TOAST projection.

 This post also applies to equirectangular all-sky maps in equirectangular format.

While Dinoj wasn't explicit about this, you can point to any 360-degree panorama that's on a web site, so you don't even have to have a local copy of it.  I tried a couple of random ones on Flickr, and they worked beautifully.  (though you have to wait until the whole image is pulled in, since those aren't served at multiple zoom levels by a tile server.)

Neat.

That's great. Wondered why there was a browse option :).  Is there any way to reference this panoramas to the library of WWT, or in other words to place some kind of a metadata/tag to the image so that WWT knows what it is? How about adding it to the list of panoramas already in WWT, so as not to use the browse function each time?

 This is an amazing program and thanks to the team for letting us "watch" what's out there.