New camera lenses?

Ok, maybe this is a bit odd to ask for, but I'd love to be able to take pics in SecondLife with camera lenses that push the bounds of reality.

I'd like to take photos that would appear warped if laid out on a flat surface, but if wrapped around another surface would appear perfectly normal....like the inside of a sphere.

I'd like to be able to make virtual projection rooms, cylindrical or spherical in shape, and overlay photos onto their inner surface, and take a photo show on the "road" with me. I'd like to be able to put 360 degree photos on a web-page, and let people use a mouse to look all around at what was happening in SL at a that moment.

Those would all be awsome and I endorse the ideas.

Built in picture taking features in SL are highly underated, which is sad because theres some definit potential there.

For now all we have are fish eye and such (Ctrl-8, 9 and 0 I think and under View).

Yeah 8 is zoom out (fish eye) fun to fly around through tight builds with I assure you
9 is wtf was I thinking! it resets your view
0 is Lee Harvey Oswald

I think I have 8 and 0 right, if not then switch them... results may vary

I'd like to see a few more checkbox options besides show UI in snapshot too like Sepia tone or desaturate to make od fashioned snaps... Oh well there is always snapshot to disk and edit how you like.

most higher end texturing programs (such as darktree etc) designed for use in creating/manipulating images for 3d environmenrts can do the mesh warping necessary to do what you ask, given any normal screenshot

for example you can take a photo still of a face, and have it save it so that it will look normal, when wrapped around a cylander, or sphere, etc. I think there is even some freeware out there that can help you do that.

one thing to remember is starting with a pristine normal photo, you can always warp it, distort it etc to do any number of effects... starting with an already warped image however, there is really nowhere you can go to 'recover' it properly, hence havin a lens that 'did it' automatically would be probably not so nice, compared to jus takin a normal ` snapshot an runnin it through a third party program

Eltee, even if we could do this, currently this woudn't allow me to do what I want: Take a 360-degree snapshot, looking in all directions at once, then wrap that onto a curved surface that will reproduce that 360 degree field of view at any time in the future.

I'd like to be able to reproduce these 360 deg snapshots at any time on interior surfaces inworld, or on websites out-world.

For real-life references to the ideas, please see Kaidan's One Shot 360 or VRNewsTV.

theres *plenty* of image stitching packages out there that could more or less do what yer asking for.. you would just need to make sure to only use the 'inner' third or so of the photograph (horizontally) as it will have the least distortion (a simple method would be to roughly overlap shots by about 50% each, turning in a circle, then stitch them up as a single resultant image which from there you can manipulate as you see fit

the reason you can't do it all at once is because thats not how 3d rendering works... in 3d rendering, unlike the real world photography, the subjects don't exist.. aka whats behind you, is not there at all until you turn to look at it. given the end result is a 2d projection.. its not really possible to 'slice' 3d space with a single cut, projecting it to 2d.. the video card isn't rendering ANY of that stuff thats behind you etc until you turn around to look at it, or pull the camera back more, but then you are viewing the things behind you from the wrong perspective.

given the final image is a 2d pane, 'wide angle' single exposures just get more and more and more skewed and distored the more you try to view at once.. the solution is as i mentioned, multiple exposures which can be stitched together

to do it in real life, you also cannot expose the entire film at once, they use basically a rotating attachment which takes multiple frames, or a near infinite series of smooth 'vertical bar' exposures across a sheet of film.

the basic limitation is there is no way to project, in a single exposure, a full 3d space, into a 2d space... you simply need multiple exposures, multiple captured images, to be able to reconstruct any small part of that third dimension...

those one shot 3d things are kinda bs (the thing you linked to).. they rely on the massive resolution of film (about 3200 dpi) to compensate for the huge distortions they introduce into the image.. in order to use that trick in sl (and technically you can)

fisheye the camera to maximum
move the camera above you pointing down and slowly raise it up

unless you have a 4000x3000 pixel screen resolution tho you won't get a usable 'panorama' from it, jus an ugly mess of pixels... the stitch method is superior

There's a great program I've used for years called PanoTools. Here's a link to the free parts of the program:
http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~dersch/

But, Photoshop CS has built-in stitching ability (though not spherical):
http://www.adobe.com/education/digkids/tips/photoshop_cs/psdCS_panorama.html

Also, try messing with the aspect ratio in SL preferences.