Background: Panorama Viewer Geometry

A panoramic picture is a photo with a horizontal and/or vertical visual field of view which is too large for a satisfying "flat" representation.

Examples: Landscapes, urban environments, interiors of buildings, architectural ensembles. A panoramic picture is typically a seamless 360° image taken from one viewpoint. To the extreme, it is a full spherical image allowing a vertical visual angle of +/- 90°.

Special technology is required for creating and viewing this kind of picture.

For an overview of software products for creating ("stitching") panoramas please click here. Let's now have a look on viewing panoramas.

A panoramic viewer is a software tool which enables you to watch panoramic pictures comfortably on a computer screen.

This is achieved by displaying a moveable section of a large picture within a window.

Typically, the user moves the mouse to indicate the direction where the visual section should be moved.

This is a technique for transfering a ball-shaped ("spherical") image to a flat surface. The resulting image looks kind of distorted (see above).

A panoramic viewer is able to display an arbitrary section of this image "correctly". This is a time-consuming operation, compared to displaying just a "flat" image.

The "moving with the mouse" technology was originally developed for displaying panoramic pictures. If this is combined with flat projection, it is well suited for any case where a section of a large picture is to be displayed on a screen.

Typical resolution of a 17- or 19-inch monitor:	1280 x 1024 pixels
Typical resolution of a 5-megapixel camera:	2560 x 1920 pixels

Large pictures in this sense is exactly what you get from today's digital cameras -
so the answer is definitely yes.