What is the most mature library to render equirectangular images in Flash?

Question

I have a series of equirectangular images. I'd like to display them in a custom Flash player so that the user could see the spherical nature of the images, and "look up", "look down", "look left/right" (or pan, zoom, etc). (Note that I have a long series of images, so the library must allow for dynamic loading of the images themselves, rather than having the images "baked" into the SWF player.)

What is the best library to manage the display of the equirectangular images in Flash? By "best", I mean the most mature, most reliable, most robust, and fastest performing.

For reference, an example of an equirectangular image can be found at http://archive.bigben.id.au/tutorials/360/background/projections.html.

Answer 1

Although this creates a 3d impression, the problem has actually nothing to do with 3d, as long as you don't plan distorting the individual tiles to enhance the 3d effect.

All you need is a tile renderer, that supports scrolling, zooming and lazy loading.

There are several flash game engines that have tile renderers, but I think, that's not a good starting point. AFAIK, they do not use lazy loading (but all-in-one preloading) and do not have zoom. Yet, a look at their code might give you some inspiration.

Maybe you're luckier if you try to find an open source flash map viewer. It basically has all the functionality you need.

Answer 2

I believe it can be done with Papervision3D, which is "mature, reliable, robust and fastest performing".

Answer 3

When I did something like this a while ago I used Papervision3D, and had it up and running in maybe a half hour. Start with a simple example like this - that example doesn't use an equirectangular image, but by default PV3D treats textures on spheres as if they're equirectangular, so if you substitute in your image it should "just work". You'll just have to tweak the positioning so the camera is inside the sphere, and make sure the sphere is double-sided.

Best of all, it's easy to tweak the number of polygons to trade off quality for speed - you can do this live if necessary. (That is, after a few seconds if the framerate is too low you could nuke the sphere and make a new one with fewer divisions.)

Answer 4

It sounds like it should be possible to write a Pixel Bender kernel that handles the projection. The only problem there is that your material is split up into multiple tiles, so some other tool would need to load the sources first and precompose the required tiles for a certain view into one bitmap which then gets passed to the shader.

I searched on google and here is what I found: http://www.subblue.com/blog/2010/6/17/little_planets