de Havilland Vampire (WZ507) Interactive Cockpit Panorama

[HaraldJoergens]

The de Havilland Vampire WZ507 is well known to the British air show scene, a rare cold war jet fighter preserved and flown by the Vampire Preservation Group, based at North Weald airfield.

This interactive cockpit panorama has been created for the Vampire website - it's enormously expensive to keep such an old warbird flying, and the panorama is meant to attract visitors to the Vampire website, join their Supporter's Club, or even become shareholders.

Click HERE to open the panorama, and switch to full screen mode!



If you are interested in future aircraft panoramas, please sign up to my mailing list!

A bit more about the panorama can be found here.

Next to come are a Tiger Moth, and complete virtual tour of one of the iconic WWII bombers. If you can think of an aircraft that could benefit from such work, please let me know!

 

[JohnSilver]

Fantastic work!

Can you tell, how many hours of work it is to complete such a panorama?

 

[HaraldJoergens]

Hi John,

This panorama uses focus stacking, to have anything from the closest to the furthest part sharp and in focus, and it uses HDR because of the extreme differences between the shadow areas in the cockpit and the bright sunshine.

It's created from 24 21MP segments, each segment has 5 photos for exposure stacking times 5 for exposure bracketing, that's 576 photos actually used. Focus stacking needs a bit of masking, that has to be done 120 times, then the stacked images have to be processed in HDR. All that done, they are stitched together, with a lot of masking and editing. The resulting, very large file is then processed into a panorama, all the hotspots are defined, the aircraft owner provides the detail information which is then embedded.

The photography took only three hours, the whole panorama took around 6 (long) days. That explains why interactive panoramas are not exactly cheap...

Hope this wasn't too detailed!

 

[JohnSilver]

Danke!