A reference book on the art and techniques of virtual reality photography by one of the pioneers in the field, Scott Highton.The book includes sections on Photography Basics, Panoramic VR Imaging, Object VR Imaging, and Business Practices.Intended audience includes both professional and amateur photographers, as well as multimedia authors and designers.

- Easy to follow - Companion website - The first book of this type on the market, - Clear step-by-step guides with practice images supplied, and show case of inspirational, professionally produced examples

The Complete Guide to VR will help you get to grips with this exciting new technology from first principles, so you know what's out there, and what you want. Discover all there is to know about home VR systems, whether they're computer-based, or work using your mobile phone. This book will introduce you to a whole spectrum of VR possibilities including VR games, creating your own VR films and exploring the world using it.

The Complete Guide to VR will help you get to grips with this exciting new technology from first principles, so you know what's out there, and what you want. Discover all there is to know about home VR systems, whether they're computer-based, or even work using your mobile phone. This book will introduce you to a whole spectrum of VR possibilities including VR games, creating your own VR films and even exploring the world using it.

Explore the exciting new worlds of virtual reality photography and video: what to watch, how to watch, and how to make your own VR videos and images.

Virtual reality can transport you across town or around the world. And it's easy and inexpensive to test the (virtual) waters-not only as someone who views VR content but also creates it. In this course, photographer, educator, and author Ben Long introduces the essential concepts and tools behind photographic- and video-based VR. After detailing a brief history of VR, Ben shows a sampling of inexpensive VR viewers (such as VR apps and VR goggles for your smartphone) and where to go to check out great VR content. He also reviews the tools and techniques for creating your own VR photos and videos, and dealing with challenges in post-production, such as moving media to the computer, stitching and mapping 360-degree images and video, playing back VR video, and sharing VR content online.

Viewpoint-free photography, i.e., interactively controlling the viewpoint of a photograph after capture, is a standing challenge. In this thesis, we investigate algorithms to enable viewpoint-free photography for virtual reality (VR) from casual capture, i.e., from footage easily captured with consumer cameras. We build on an extensive body of work in image-based rendering (IBR). Given images of an object or scene, IBR methods aim to predict the appearance of an image taken from a novel perspective. Most IBR methods focus on full or near-interpolation, where the output viewpoints either lie directly between captured images, or nearby. These methods are not suitable for VR, where the user has significant range of motion and can look in all directions. Thus, it is essential to create viewpoint-free photos with a wide field-of-view and sufficient positional freedom to cover the range of motion a user might experience in VR. We focus on two VR experiences: 1) Seated VR experiences, where the user can lean in different directions. This simplifies the problem, as the scene is only observed from a small range of viewpoints. Thus, we focus on easy capture, showing how to turn panorama-style capture into 3D photos, a simple representation for viewpoint-free photos, and also how to speed up processing so users can see the final result on-site. 2) Room-scale VR experiences, where the user can explore vastly different perspectives. This is challenging: More input footage is needed, maintaining real-time display rates becomes difficult, view-dependent appearance and object backsides need to be modelled, all while preventing noticeable mistakes. We address these challenges by: (1) creating refined geometry for each input photograph, (2) using a fast tiled rendering algorithm to achieve real-time display rates, and (3) using a convolutional neural network to hide visual mistakes during compositing. Overall, we provide evidence that viewpoint-free photography is feasible from casual capture. We thoroughly compare with the state-of-the-art, showing that our methods achieve both a numerical improvement and a clear increase in visual quality for both seated and room-scale VR experiences.