Stata Center Panoramas

I've recently become interested in shooting spherical panorama pictures.

[Taken from 18th floor of building 54.]

MIT's controversial, overbudget 300 million dollar Stata Center (some reports put the cost at as much as $430 million) is full of strange angles and unexpected juxtaposition of geometric shapes.

Since I'm spending Spring 2008 here, it seemed like a good target for my first panorama project.

A Fisheye Lens

I borrowed a regular camera (Olympus E-510 DSLR) from a friend.

I bought a fisheye lens for it (Olympus Digital Zuiko 8mm).
Fisheye lenses have a distorted but very wide angle of view; for the Zuiko 8mm, it comes out to about 170° measured diagonally.

[R&D pub from above.]

This distortion can make for interesting images such as these, but their coverage makes them especially useful for 360° x 180° spherical panoramas.
[From LIDS lounge on 6th floor looking towards the Kiva.]

Add a tripod and a special rotating head to avoid parallax, some software, and we can appropriately render the modern-day trompe-l'oeil shots below.

(For the boring details involved, see my blog entry.)

6 Spherical Panoramas

These 6 .mov files can be viewed using the free version of Apple's Quicktime Player (and other software).

Link: http://www.apple.com/quicktime

[You can scroll, i.e. rotate, in all directions. You can also zoom in (shift key) and out (control key).]

Warning: these are fairly large files, of the order from 6MB to 10MB.
(I've resisted scaling them down to maintain quality and minimize artifacts.
Also, bandwidth is cheap.)

Here is a rough key for where the pictures were taken:

For most of the interior pictures, looking up reveals interesting features.

Click on thumbnail (equirectangular) picture for .mov file Location

Outside
Taken before noon (see the position of the sun in the sky) and just before people started coming out to eat their lunch.

Kiva
Inside the yellow Kiva.
A CSAIL seminar room.

R&D Pub
The R&D pub faces Vassar St.
Opens Thursday and Friday evenings.

Dreyfoos Tower
Ground floor of the Dreyfoos tower.

Gerry's Office
Gerry Sussman is a very cool computer science professor.
Interesting utilization of space and a high ceiling.
I counted 6 hanging objects.

Noam Chomsky's Office
Ahem. Noam Chomsky's office...

Sandiway Fong
April 2008

Last modified: Fri May 2 12:59:58 EDT 2008

Click on thumbnail (equirectangular) picture for .mov file	Location
	Outside Taken before noon (see the position of the sun in the sky) and just before people started coming out to eat their lunch.
	Kiva Inside the yellow Kiva. A CSAIL seminar room.
	R&D Pub The R&D pub faces Vassar St. Opens Thursday and Friday evenings.
	Dreyfoos Tower Ground floor of the Dreyfoos tower.
	Gerry's Office Gerry Sussman is a very cool computer science professor. Interesting utilization of space and a high ceiling. I counted 6 hanging objects.
	Noam Chomsky's Office Ahem. Noam Chomsky's office...