Guidelines for Drawing Immersive Panoramas in Equirectangular Perspective

Virtual Reality (VR) Panoramas work by interactively creating immersive anamorphoses from spherical perspectives. These panoramas are usually photographic but a growing number of artists are making hand-drawn equirectangular perspectives in order to visualize them as VR panoramas. This is a practice with both artistic and didactic interest. However, these drawings are usually done by trial-and-error, with ad-hoc measurements and interpolation of pre-computed grids, a process with considerable limitations. We develop in this work the analytic tools for plotting great circles, straight line images and their vanishing points, and then provide guidelines for achieving these constructions in good approximation without computer calculations, through descriptive geometry diagrams that can be executed using only ruler, compass, and protractor.