This paper presents the design of Ztitch, a mobile phone application that can create immersive panoramic scenes in real time, where multiple photos are arranged in the 3D space according to their camera poses, maintaining a realistic perspective of the scene. By taking full advantage of the touchscreen, accelerometer, and gyroscope in the phone, Ztitch allows users to easily fine-tune each photo's position, navigate the scene, and edit the scenes created by others. When there is a undesired gap or overlap between the two ends of a 360° immersive panorama due to unknown camera focal length or accumulated errors, a fast and accurate algorithm is developed to jointly adjust the entire sequence to achieve the desired panorama. This is again achieved by leveraging the touchscreen of the phone. In addition, a fast color-balancing and exposure-compensation technique is developed to blend neighboring images.

Modern smartphones provide an excellent platform for creating 3D scenes from photos. While there already exists many mobile applications that can stitch a set of photos to create a single, panoramic landscape photo, this paper proposes the creation of panoramic scenes where multiple photos are projected in a 3D space using the pinhole camera model, so that a realistic perspective of the scene is maintained. Our application allows users to automatically create a panoramic 3D scene in real-time using the live images from the phone's camera, and to manually fine-tune each photo's position via the touchscreen if the default position is inaccurate. The application enables scenes to be easily shared to other users, and was developed using the Silverlight framework so that it can run across multiple platforms.