[ Edit 11/16/2014] : I let it there for memo , but if you want fresh news go to panoramics page; the pannellum version used there is 2.0+ now.
I’ve been working hard since 6 months with image stitching, and I’m quite good now at it. I use Hugin panorama stitcher to make and control them ; coupled with gimp that’s a great process , whenever they does 10Mo or 1Go..
The hardest to find -as opensource and free software- is a non-flash viewer proposing wide screen and tiling for spherical panos ( you now: photos are made at 360° horizontally and vertically around you), showing it with the good angle of view ( field of view, or « hfov » -horizontal field of view) to avoid ugly deformations. The goal is to obtain a « google-street-view-like » but with great pictures, not « automatic-stitched ,parallax-full,and cylindrical ones », and to be capable to display informations while viewing it.
I’ve been searching it for a while , knowing that HTML5 canvas should do it and I’ve been making a sphere in Blender , mapping the equirectangular pano in it, posting it to Sketchfab.com:
Opensource 360° Pano viewer
by FabKzo
on Sketchfab
Opensource 360° Pano viewer from FabKzo on Sketchfab.
There your pano size is limited to almost 4000px as I remember, allowing quick access to the picture; but losing in quality , moreover when you would show people a great panorama; then you have to tile your pano in order not load the entire picture each time you open it (and for a Gigapano that’s a matter).
But I’ve also found Matthew Petroff’s work : Pannellum
And I give it a try there:
Reactive, more easy to practice if you have a server to host your panos and pannellum. Image quality is better there for almost the same speed; and since it’s opensource you have access to the code if you want to modify it to your needs.
For the moment spherical panos are limited to 4096 px width due to WebGl texture system as explained by Matthew:
« > Since Pannellum currently loads the image as one texture, the WebGL texture
> size limits limit the maximum image resolution. I recommend a maximum image
> dimension of 4096 pixels on the largest side, as it is supported by >90% of
> WebGL enabled browsers. If you need higher resolution, a maximum image
> dimension of 8192 pixels is supported by >60% of WebGL enabled browsers. A
> maximum image dimension of 16384 pixels is supported by ~14% of WebGL enabled
> browsers, and anything larger, e.g. your image dimension of 29542 pixels,
> isn’t supported by any browsers.
> I’m currently working on adding support for larger images using a
> multiresolution, image pyramid based scheme, but it’s currently in an alpha
> state. Once done, it will allow for arbitrarily large images, but for now one
> is in practice limited to a maximum image dimension of 4096 pixels, a
> resolution of about 8 megapixels for a full equirectangular panorama.
-Matthew »
source: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/hugin-ptx/6wdLOt2TPEg