I spent a good bit of time reading up on a variety of 360 camera technologies and the software behind them that make them work. The short version is that I will need software to stitch the photos from each camera into one equirectangular picture. Once I have equirectangular frames, I should be able to combine them into a video as I normally do with time-lapse videos through iMovie. Most stitching software that does this is proprietary and very expensive. After searching and trying several programs, I came across Hugin, a free program for making panoramas. To test it, I took 35 photos with my camera on a tripod from the top of the Mowatt Parking garage. Importantly, this test only involved rotating the camera horizontally (+Z*) and did not involve any vertical panning. http://imgur.com/IH6iZCX If you look closely you can see a few tiny issues but I was pleased with the outcome. I’m a bit worried that the stitching process may take too much time when I need to stitch each frame of a several hour time-lapse, but I’ll worry about that more if/when it becomes a problem. I’m also hoping to be able to automate the stitching process – if I need to manually feed Hugin the photos from each camera to form each frame, this project will take years. I’ll need to perform additional tests to determine the minimum number of photos necessary for a clean panorama – 35 cameras is way too many for this project.
* To clarify the camera’s tilt and direction, I’ll try to use the xyz axis commonly used in engineering.
