PanView: An Extensible Panoramic Video Viewer for the Web

In this paper we present a panoramic video viewer for the web. We propose Pan View, an open-source video-based panoramic viewer that provides a greater immersion of filmed environments. The main advantage of considering panoramic video is that users can pan or tilt virtual cameras in the recorded scene, allowing them to focus on information presented in different angles or moments, thus, allowing them to access more information than in ordinary videos or in static images. Pan View is fully extensible with easy customization using user coded modules and is implemented using modern web-browser standards, which reduces the computational requirements. To motivate the use of Pan View, we present a performance comparison considering a panoramic viewer based on Adobe Flash Player. The applicability of Pan View is shown in two projects: virtual tour on historical cities and analysis of a railroad network.