Show HN: Bubble Cam – Walking simulator from panoramic photography

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I developed this graphical technique for use in a video game. I've been calling it Bubble Cam. Basically it’s like what would happen if Google Street View took a picture every quarter of an inch instead of every fifteen feet.

See playable demo here: https://gamejolt.com/games/thewebsiteisdown/591936

In the writeup linked above I go into a lot of detail but essentially I photographed my parent's basement at about 2 inch resolution (meaning a panoramic picture every two inches along a path through the room) and then used various image manipulation techniques to interpolate, stabilize, smooth and track features. The result is a very realistic "walking simulator" with interactive elements. I am developing this in the context of a game but I can imagine other uses as well.

Also see the part where I am reproducing an old IBM 5160 in game.

Lots of fun stuff in there. I hope you enjoy. Feedback would be great!

this is super cool! what interpolation algorithm to use? optical flow stuff? So do you do interpolation in preprocessing, instead of doing it in real-time? will that generate lots of data?

Thank you! I used Twixtor which is an AfterEffects plugin that does use optical flow. I do it all in a pre-processing workflow which takes the 189 source panoramic images and generates 756 interpolated images which are about 90gb in size. I then encode them into a WEBM video for distribution which brings the size down to 92mb (lores or 224mb hires). This video is extracted into memory at runtime and the images are then mapped to the background sphere based on where the player moves. Memory intensive but very fast.

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