This RViz plugin takes two panospheric images and blends them on a skysphere. The sphere is created directly in OGRE and blending is GL-accelerated. Credit goes to Felipe Bacim whos rviz_textured_quads package helped me to get started.

Make sure you are publishing a sensor_msgs/Image topic for each hemisphere. Load the rviz_textured_sphere plugin and select appropriate image topics.

roslaunch rviz_textured_sphere demo.launch

• image topics
• image transport methods (compression)
• field of view of the images
• region size that will be blended

More information about this package is available in the paper Improved Situational Awareness in ROS Using Panospheric Vision and Virtual Reality. If you are using this software please add the following citation to your publication:

@INPROCEEDINGS{VunderSA2018, 
author={V. Vunder and R. Valner and C. McMahon and K. Kruusamäe and M. Pryor}, 
booktitle={2018 11th International Conference on Human System Interaction (HSI)}, 
title={Improved Situational Awareness in ROS Using Panospheric Vision and Virtual Reality}, 
year={2018}, 
pages={471-477}, 
keywords={Robots;Data visualization;Cameras;Headphones;Lenses;Distortion;Rendering (computer graphics);situational awareness;human-robot interaction;virtual reality;user interfaces;panospheric vision;telerobotics;ROS;RViz}, 
doi={10.1109/HSI.2018.8431062}, 
month={July},}