Pannellum is a lightweight, free, and open source panorama viewer for the web. Built using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and WebGL, it provides plugin-free display of panoramic images in equirectangular, cubemap, and multiresolution formats. The viewer supports hot spots for linking scenes or displaying information, enabling virtual tours. It includes a comprehensive API for programmatic control, device orientation support for mobile devices, fullscreen capability, and responsive touch and mouse controls. The architecture separates core WebGL rendering logic (in libpannellum.js) from viewer UI and API logic (in pannellum.js), with fallback to CSS 3D transforms when WebGL is unavailable. A utility script (generate.py) creates multiresolution tile sets for efficient streaming of large panoramas.
WorldGen is a Python library and demo application for generating 3D scenes from text prompts or single images in seconds. It orchestrates a pipeline of state-of-the-art models: a fine-tuned FLUX diffusion model to generate 360° panoramic images, DA-2 for monocular depth estimation on equirectangular images, and optionally OneFormer for semantic segmentation and LaMa for inpainting to handle background occlusions. The 3D scene is produced as a Gaussian splatting point cloud (via a custom RGBD-to-Gaussian conversion) or as a textured mesh. An experimental mode uses Apple's Sharp model for higher-quality Gaussian splats by processing cubemap faces. The codebase demonstrates strong engineering practices for a research project: modular pipeline design, use of submodules for dependencies, custom diffusers pipelines with VAE tiling modifications for seamless panorama generation, and a Viser-based interactive viewer. While the core value is the integrated pipeline, several utility modules (equirectangular projection utilities, splat file handling) are cleanly isolated and reusable in other 360° or 3D vision projects.
PiLiDAR is a DIY 360° 3D panorama scanner application for Raspberry Pi. It integrates a LiDAR (LD06/STL27L), stepper motor, IMU, and Raspberry Pi camera to capture 2D scans and photos, then processes them into colored 3D point clouds and 360° panoramas. The system is orchestrated by a main Python script (PiLiDAR.py) that controls hardware, captures data, and runs post-processing pipelines. The codebase is modular with a library of device drivers, calibration utilities, and 3D processing functions. It supports hardware PWM via curve-fitted speed control, automatic exposure and white balance calibration, Hugin-based panorama stitching, and Open3D-based point cloud registration, meshing, and visualization. The architecture is monolithic but well-organized, with clear separation of concerns. Key strengths include robust LiDAR protocol handling, reusable stepper motor control, and a comprehensive point cloud processing pipeline. The project is actively maintained with recent commits and low technical drift, though it requires specific hardware and external tools (Hugin, rpicam-still) to function.