#Fisheye vs wide angle manual#

IPIX aggressively protected their patents, and for years successfully prevented most others from releasing stitching software that could assemble panoramic images from any type of fisheye lens capture methods.Īs a result of their aggressive legal tactics, IPIX generated considerable ill will in the VR community. These were initially also shot on 35mm film using another expensive Nikon lens the Nikkor 8mm f/2.8 fisheye. IPIX followed Apple’s release of QTVR a year or two later with their proprietary software, which assembled two hemispheric fisheye images into a “PhotoBubble,” or complete spherical panorama. The wider the lens, the more vertical coverage you could get in your panorama, since stitching was limited to a single row of images.įor many years, this remained the case, even as newer stitching applications came on to the market. QTVR Authoring software required that source images for panoramic stitching be rectilinearly corrected (so straight lines in the scene appeared as straight lines on film), and the 15mm Nikkor was one of the widest lenses available of this type.

#Fisheye vs wide angle manual#

Shooting on 35mm film was the only real option, and Nikon’s manual focus 15mm f/3.5 ultra wide lens was the lens of choice, even though it cost close to $2,000.

In 1994, when Apple first released QuickTime VR, photographers had very little choice in what camera and lens types they could use for panoramic VR. By Scott Highton for Virtual Reality Photography (March, 200 8