Category Archives: My Photos

More fun with reflecting balls

After yesterday’s post, I decided that I’d like to try to make some better reflection maps. So I shot this image of my office reflecting in a Christmas tree ball. The image is pretty noisy because my office isn’t brightly lit. (Addendum: I also had the camera set for outdoor white balance, which makes the overall image look pretty crufty. I just shot a different image, and got this better image, which has a magenta hue, but isn’t yellow orange at least.) I then cropped it to a square containing just the ball, and passed it through my unwarping program:

Cylindrical Projection of My Office

I have a different version of my program that produces a cube map, which is perhaps more intelligible (click on it for a bigger version):


Cube Map of My Office

It appears that the quality is pretty much limited by the poor surface of the reflecting ball. You can see a lump in the ball causes the book in the foreground to have a distorted outline.

Still, fun stuff.

Cool video experiment

Video Thing has a cool experiment in shooting panoramic video using a Christmas tree ball mounted on a boom in front of a DV cam. An After Effects plugin turns the resulting reflection into a cylindrical environment video. Very cool.

I did some experiments a while ago using this setup, only with still images instead of video. My old Kodak 210+ wouldn’t focus close enough to get a good image of the ball, so I turned out this:

cylindrical map

The code was pretty simple to write: just convert from reflected rayspace into a cylindrical map. Cool stuff.

Weekend Pic

Carmen at TahoeCarmen and I spent a short weekend at Reno/Tahoe, and I snapped this picture of her at the shore of Lake Tahoe. A nice trip, alas, all to short. Love you honey! Every moment with you is a vacation all by itself.

Picture seems overblown because I used my cameraphone, and let’s face it, it’s not the greatest camera.

Carmen eating Dim Sum

WordPress › Error

There has been a critical error on this website.

Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.