Little KAIRA Planet

Recently, we wrote about how to generate a panorama from 360 images of one degree field of view. However, we can play this game some more. These panoramas are 360°, which means that their outer (left and right) edges match exactly. Therefore, one can use an image manipulation program such as Gimp to create what is knows as "little planet" images. The name stems from the fact that these landscape panoramas are fully encircled by sky and thus look a bit like a planet, alas in the wrong scale.

Here's the little-planet version of the sunny KAIRA panorama, which in addition was rotated in order to have Saana at the top like in the image above. The star-shaped shades are due to the automatic exposure of the GoPro time-lapse camera.

The key ingredient to making these kind of images is Gimp's distortion filter "polar co-ordinates."

Photos and editing: Thomas Ulich.

A related and more explicit description is available on the MiVyoo blog.