Meant to be Seen

With fisheye imaging live feeds it is hard to see what is going on at the image periphery unless the feed is dewarped. Magic Lantern the third party firmware for recent Canon DSLRs can do live preview in camera in dewarped form. Either as rectilinear or "Panini" perspective. The second especially is good for getting an undistored version of 180+ coverage. Then you can film exactly as you can render out the corrected views .. like here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRjd7iO7drM&hd=1

also it is much easier to hold the camera system steady and keep it level if you have a suitable non-fisheye perspective to look at

also this feature works when shooting Raw too with the latest firmware so you can get an accurate non-fisheye preview plus improved latitude and detail


http://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/Fisheye_Support

PeterM

Thanks much! I am still running an old Magic Lantern on my Canon EOS-550D from when they first added HDR video recording. I have a fisheye lens now, so I will check out that new firmware.

I was actually thinking awhile back of hacking the firmware for Rift pre-warp, because the camera has HDMI output. It would be even cooler if it supported the head tracker over the camera USB OTG port.

Too many projects already though. It will have to wait...


I was not aware of Panini projections before, so thanks for that bit of new knowledge too! It might work rather well inside my GMsphere program...

EDIT: Ahh, to heck with schedules and humongous "To Do" lists! I am setting up a Magic Lantern toolchain now. I at least want a successful ML build from source. Then I can see where to mod ML to display a SBS mono pair of images. Even cooler to be able to look around a fisheye snapshot in a Rift, directly on the camera. Cool for life preview look-around too, with camera on tripod. Will probably use camera cursor keys first, before trying to support the Rift IMU directly in the camera... I wonder what framerate/lag it will have. Even so, it would still be cool!