Abstract: A viewer relying on a conformal projection process to perserve local shapes is provided employing a rotated cylindriac mapping. In the image generation process, the source panoramic image, which can be elliptical, is placed on a sphere according to the angular location of pixels in the panomorph. The sphere is rotated around its center to a desired orientation before being projected to a cylinder also centered at the sphere's center with its longitudinal axis along the sphere's z-axis. The projected image on the cylinder is unwrapped and displayed by the viewer.

Abstract: A method of splitting of elliptical images performed by a processor is provided. The method includes: receiving an image whose pixels span a range along each of two orthogonal axes; segmenting the image into indexed sub-images; storing the sub-images as texture maps; responding to a request for a value of a texture element having S1, T1 and H coordinates by returning the value of the texture element of the sub-image indexed by H whose X and Y coordinates are S1 and T1.

Abstract: There is provided a method for mapping a panoramic image to a 3-D virtual object of which a projection is made for display on a screen. The method includes: providing the panoramic image in a memory, the panoramic image being defined by a set of pixels in a 2-dimensional space; providing a model of the object, the model having a set of vertices in a 3-dimensional space; selecting a vertex on the model, the selected vertex being characterized by a set of angular coordinates; applying a transformation to the angular coordinates to obtain a set of polar coordinates; identifying a pixel whose position in the panoramic image is defined by the polar coordinates; and storing in memory an association between the selected vertex on the model and a value of the identified pixel.