Google Street View Like Engine

what I'm trying to start doing is creating a google street view like engine, however i haven't really worked with images and opengl/directx however i have a very good understand in the programming language. Could anyone give me any pointers or know of already existing APIs for this kind of thing?

my aims are to be able to take a stitched images and wrap it round a spherical 'atmosphere' and then be able to navigate around it ether by keyboard or by mouse click on the screen like google maps arrows.

Solution

Streetview is basically just a Skybox with hot spots in it you can click. It's not terribly difficult to implement (heck back a few years I did thing kind of thing with realtime live streaming video).

Unfortunately all the basic building blocks sum up to so much complexity that an Stack Overflow answer is not the right format to it. I give you some pointers though. You must learn to:

Create an OpenGL context
Load image data into textures
load a geometry you draw your skybox with into a Vertex Array
- optionally load it into a Vertex Buffer Object
how to draw textured geometry with OpenGL
the way generic coordinates are transformed into screen space position using the concept of homogenous coordinates and matrix transformation

You also might want to look into shader programming