360 Degree Photo viewer on Linux

[oshunluvr]

I got a new phone few weeks ago called an "Essential Phone" from a new company started by one of the founders of Android OS. I got a special deal on Amazon for the phone that came with a 360° camera and it's really a cool gadget. It has two 180° cameras on a small device that attaches to the phone using a magnet. When you take a picture it captures all things in sight except the phone itself. It also takes videos and you can view the photos in "stereo" if you have a VR viewing device for your phone. Pretty cool.

Viewing these off of the phone takes special software but there are browser add-ons and Facebook can also display them. How you view them is with your mouse (or fingertip on a phone) you can rotate the image in any direction including up and down. If you look down, I see my hand holding the phone, but not the phone or camera itself. If I upload the photo to Facebook and view it with my phone, the image rotates with the angle of the phone as well as with my finger.

I did find this simple viewer that runs on Linux without installation but it's resolution is not very good. The picture displays but it is noticeably fuzzy.

http://www.fsoft.it/FSPViewer/download/

I thought you all might like to see the computer systems I work on. The one in the image is using 8 - 75" Samsung commercial displays mounted sideways and a plethora of other smaller monitors. This system has 17 CPUs running Linux or Windows. The largest of the systems are 21 CPUs and 10 of the large screens. The current project is to replace the 56 current systems' rear projection displays with these new LED panels. I was at the facility helping set these new bad boy's up and correcting the image distortion caused by transitioning from 4x3 projectors to these 16x9 flat panels.

These systems are used by Air Traffic Control to train new and transferring controllers at all our airports. We also have smaller portable systems for the smaller airports that don't have the room or access to one of the large units.

Here's the image:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1sonhy1jc3...70701.jpg?dl=0

If you don't have a capable photo viewer extension on your browser, download the image and the program above to view it. The airport in the picture is Houston Intercontinental.

[GreyGeek]

Wow!
And the gentleman with the mostly bald head and gray beard is you! Nice beard! Wish I could grow one.

My iPhone6+ can take a series of panoramic photos and automatically stitch them together to display a similar photo. Don’t use that capability often. Your output is much more impressive and you don’t have to avoid boundary distortion problems.

[oshunluvr]

Wow!
And the gentleman with the mostly bald head and gray beard is you! Nice beard! Wish I could grow one.

Got a chuckle out of this. I never thought of my beard as much of a positive thing. I was one of those guys who had to shave regularly before I could drive! The growth in that photo is about four weeks worth. My wife likes the goatee look so I grow it for her fairly often but every few months I have to clean it off for a month to let my skin breathe.

On the plus side, the age for buying beer was 18 in Kansas and with a beard at 16 I was always the one the guys sent to the grocery store to buy it! I never got carded even once.

When you combine that with the grey starting in my mid-twenties I have never been accused of looking younger than my age. I solved that by dating older women most of my young adult life so I looked like a really youthful mid-aged guy for like 15 years, LOL! By the time I met my wife I was 39 and had stopped caring about the hair color. I had died it off-and-on until about 32 when I discovered every part of my body had some grey hair, so I stopped bothering.


Oh and BTW - I'm not mostly bald, I just have a very well-developed forehead

[GreyGeek]

With all those brains there's no room for hair roots!

I'm just the opposite. When I graduated from the Barnes School of Business in 1960 at 19 yrs of age I began looking for a data processing job in heavy iron (540 Gang punch, 402 Tabulator, etc... Kept being told to come back when I was 16. Even at 21 I looked like I was 15 or 16. I shaved once or twice a week whether I needed to or not as a freshman. When I do try to grow a beard it comes in sparse and patchy. Looks terrible. It takes a week to be noticeable. I use an electric razor once or twice a week to get rid of the fuzz.

[jlittle]

I haven't seen my chin for thirty-odd years. In IT (at least where I was) it was common for men to wear a beard, especially if you were less of a "suit" and more of a techie. Amusing for it to become fashionable for young men; this has persisted far longer than I expected. Long hair came back for a while but didn't last long, with short back and sides trendy now. (I began wearing my hair short as a student because I had a very hot cycle helmet.)