DISPLAYING AND NAVIGATING PANORAMIC VIDEO BROWSER-BASED APPLICATION

摘要

A method for providing panoramic videos and images to a user using a server-client architecture while minimizing the wait time necessary before still images are available for viewing or videos begin playing. A series of locationreferenced panoramic images are separated into one-dimensional tracks. Intuitive user controls are provided which allow the user to start and stop video playback, step through the panoramas in a track one at a time, and change the viewing orientation within the panorama. A video will start playing as soon as the video files for the preferred projected cube faces have been downloaded. This delay is reduced by storing the videos as keyframe distance files for opposing directions for each cube face and further reduced by encoding videos with different starting points so that they are staggered by a portion of the keyframe distance.