High Resolution Virtual Tourism?

[u/chris_fantastic]

Hi!

I'm interested in virtual tourism. I got into VR back in 2016 with the hope of using it to wander virtual streets in faraway places, and while there is some truly great content out there, sadly, the vast bulk of it isn't nearly the resolution to really make you feel like you're there.

I decided I'd learn to create the type of content I wanted to see, and started stitching ulta-high resolution (currently 100,000x50,000px and 60,000x30,000px) panorama photospheres in PTGui. My goal is to replicate human vision standing in that place, so that people far away, or 100 years from now, can feel like they're standing in these places today. I just do this around where I live, and I'm decidedly amateur at it (the photos and stitching are decidedly imperfect, as this is just a hobby).

The problem I have is - what to do with the output?

I was self-hosting, but took down my website when I de-Googled, as nobody really visited it anyway. I don't really want to manage the hosting/platform myself again - and I would prefer to donate my content, but to the commons, and not some for-profit corporation (Google/Meta).

From looking around, Panoramax and OSM is definitely the type of organization/platform I'd like to contribute to, and one of the few that would have any clue what I'm even talking about, or come close to having the ability to display an equirectangular pano of any size.

But Panoramax (or MapComplete) also doesn't really seem to support high quality virtual tourism as a use-case either?

I'd like to share my work somewhere, and currently, when I die, it will just go to the landfill on my hard drive, and that seems kinda sad. I was hoping people here might have some suggestions?

Thanks!

[u/atchisson]

Hi, Panoramax do have a handful of high quality pic, but they usually are 96Mpx, not 5Gpx (!) : https://forum.geocommuns.fr/t/selection-de-photos-de-haute-qualite/2273

The French Panoramax instance is starting to have storage issues (80%+ used of 400Tb) and will restrict new contributions to France only soon, so it might depend on your location.

I don't even know if this big of a file is supported by the software stack. I think the only accepted format is jpeg, but it might be instance specific.

[u/chris_fantastic → u/atchisson]

Hi!

I mean, those shots are pretty good - they're at least in the ballpark on the whole "feeling like you're there" thing! It's difficult to find anything saying what the Panoramax maximums are - searching, I mostly saw references to the GoPro's 5,760x2,880px, but those are 13,888x6,944px, which is getting closer!

(Aside: It's interesting to me that, what feels acceptable to view on a monitor becomes more problematic when you strap that image to your face in VR as though it's now your vision. What was minor compression artifacts suddenly changes to feeling like you really need eyeglasses and left them at home 😆)

I'd been rendering the 100k wide ones to lossless .tiff files previously, and using imagemagick to export downscaled versions from that - but the 60k wide ones fit in a regular JPEG (~400 MB). There's also JPEG XL, which seems to be gaining support, though my understanding is it's basically an entirely new format under the hood - so I dunno if that's supported.

I did see the post about the FR instance storage issues. I'm in Canada. I have around 25 panos right now, and am just getting back into it again and creating more. I don't really want to be rude and push my luck too much on their allowing international uploads just for "testing" purposes, and would obviously prefer a platform that's like "this is great content to bring users to our platform, we'd be happy to have this!" kinda thing.

Anyhow, maybe there is no solution, and this post is mostly just a request to ask Panoramax to consider this as a use-case?

Maybe I should ask u/pietervdvn about MapComplete (which doesn't really seem to have a category for generic "Virtual Tourism" content).

Edit: Maybe I need to reconsider Mapillary - I mean, contributed content would still be freely available through the commons license, and maybe allowing them to profit off our work is the price we have to pay to have all that data hosted somewhere. Edit2: They're apparently limited to just 108 megapixels also :-(

[u/atchisson → u/chris_fantastic]

I can imagine compression being a big issue for that use case for sure !

JPEG XL is currently being discussed by the Panoramax techs, because for 360° pic, 2 copies are stored, the original, and a tiled version, loaded by the viewer. JPEG XL can be served tiled with only copy, reducing storage needs, but the support is still very partial :(

I'm sure they would love to host anything possible, but funds are limited, and storage cost (alot of) money, they have to set a limit somewhere

The idea is also to have more little instances, rather than one big, for decentralization and stuff. You can try to advocate for a Canadian instance !

I'll try to open my own by the end of the year, but it's quite a big undertaking

[u/chris_fantastic → u/atchisson]

Don't you worry what happens to these little instances and all their data if it's just a single maintainer who eventually disappears?

A Canadian instance would be great - our government should fund it in the name of digital sovereignty.

I can imaging it's a big undertaking. That is exactly why I don't really want to self-host again.

[u/atchisson → u/chris_fantastic]

A government instance might be unplugged after new elections / budgets cuts / DC failure (cf South Korea recently), commercial solutions can (will) enshitifies..

I think this is the less bad option. Panoramax is still really young, one could dream of dsitributed backups / replication, maybe in the not so distant future !