PHP and XMP format: Create a Panorama 360/VR viewer in PHP and A-Frame

PHP and XMP format: Create a Panorama 360/VR viewer in PHP and A-Frame
by Janeth Kent Date: 31-10-2017 php xmp virtual reality vr 360 pano

The Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is an ISO standard, originally created by Adobe Systems Inc., for the creation, processing and interchange of standardized and custom metadata for digital documents and data sets.

XMP standardizes a data model, a serialization format and core properties for the definition and processing of extensible metadata. It also provides guidelines for embedding XMP information into popular image, video and document file formats, such as JPEG and PDF, without breaking their readability by applications that do not support XMP. Therefore, the non-XMP metadata have to be reconciled with the XMP properties. Although metadata can alternatively be stored in a sidecar file, embedding metadata avoids problems that occur when metadata is stored separately.

When you make a 360 photo or panorama, you can processes the photo and presents it in an interactive viewer like the A-frame viewer. To recognize such photos upon upload, the script looks for camera-specific metadata found in photos taken using 360-ready cameras. This information is embedded in photo's XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) and/or Exif (Exchangeable image file format) tags, and if you're sharing 360 photos or panos straight from cameras or smartphones, the script automatically does the right thing, identify the picture and show it with the right viewer. Panoramas taken with smartphones that have native panorama-capture support will be presented in an interactive viewer.

XMP data is literally embedded into the image file so can extract it with PHP's string-functions from the image file itself.

The following demonstrates this procedure using SimpleXML but every other XML API or even simple and clever string parsing may give you equal results:

$content = file_get_contents($image);
$xmp_data_start = strpos($content, '<x:xmpmeta');
$xmp_data_end   = strpos($content, '</x:xmpmeta>');
$xmp_length     = $xmp_data_end - $xmp_data_start;
$xmp_data       = substr($content, $xmp_data_start, $xmp_length + 12);
$xmp            = simplexml_load_string($xmp_data);

You can identify the equirectangular images as 360/VR images. After you have identified the images you can show the equirectangular images in the A-Frame Viewer. 

Please, note that:
XMP makes heavy use of XML namespaces, so you'll have to keep an eye on that when parsing the XMP data with some XML tools.
considering the possible size of image files, you'll perhaps not be able to use file_get_contents() as this function loads the whole image into memory. Using fopen() to open a file stream resource and checking chunks of data for the key-sequences <x:xmpmeta and </x:xmpmeta> will significantly reduce the memory footprint.

(Thanks to wohaby and alt-17 for image permissions)

 
by Janeth Kent Date: 31-10-2017 php xmp virtual reality vr 360 pano hits : 13257  
 
Janeth Kent

Janeth Kent

Licenciada en Bellas Artes y programadora por pasión. Cuando tengo un rato retoco fotos, edito vídeos y diseño cosas. El resto del tiempo escribo en MA-NO WEB DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT.

 
 
 

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