Blogs

I am currently in Copenhagen attending Reboot 8.0. During the two day conference I'll be posting panoramas here. Since the conference is all about the social web 2.0 thing, I'm using Flickr and my new SPi-V for Flickr tool.

fieldOfView.com/flickr/?page=photos/aldo/tags/reboot8
(requires shockwave and 32 mb of Video Ram or more)

Now that I am self employed, I'ld better look busy, right? I have finally updated the panoramic print gallery on fieldOfView.com with images from the 'van 4 kanten' exhibition, and some others I had not yet published.

Not only are there lots more images to enjoy, there's also the - er... - spiffy lightbox.js-inspired thickbox effect. Irony has it that thickbox is actually lots lighter than lightbox; I really like the lightness jquery as opposed to prototype/scr.ipta.culo.us (if only because of the punctuation of the latter). This was the first time I was really 'bitten' by the difference of quirks mode versus standards mode in Internet Explorer though... Oh well, another day well spent.

If you try to access resources from domains other than the domain a Shockwave movie runs on, you get an ugly and intimidating dialog box. If there are no other options than to use the files off the external domain (eg if you are using a web service, like I am for the SPi-V Flickr interface), you can proxy the contents using php and curl (if your webserver is configured to allow this).

Here's what I use to get and serve an image from a Flickr server and maskerade it as a local file:

function getImage($imageurl) {
 // create a new curl resource
 $curlinst = curl_init();

 // set URL and other appropriate options
 curl_setopt($curlinst, CURLOPT_URL, $imageurl);
 curl_setopt($curlinst, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
 curl_setopt($curlinst, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
 curl_setopt($curlinst, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
 curl_setopt($curlinst, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

It's always fun to discover people using the SPi-V engine. When the Flickr blog featured an equirectangular photo by hangglide, I found out that Flickr has a small but loyal following of SPi-V in the equirectangular group. They are using SPi-V to display their panoramas, directly off the fieldOfView site.

Cool as that might be, there's a security limitation in Shockwave that pops up a dialog box when a Shockwave movie (such as SPi-V) tries to access files from a different domain than the one the movie itself is hosted on. To work around this, I have implemented a make-shift php-based proxy, that maskerades images on Flickr servers as a local image on the same server as the SPi-V movie.

REALVIZ and fieldOfView jointly announce the availability of updated versions of VTour and SPi-V 3d.

VTour uses REALVIZ' image based modeling techniques to create 3d scenes from panoramic images. I was asked to write a viewer that displays the resulting scenes. The SPi-V3d viewer is an extension to the core SPi-V engine, which combines the panorama-features of the engine with the exciting capability to step outside the box of a panoramic image.

Update time, in no particular order:

• After a year I quit my job. I got fed up with the 4 hours a day commute, and decided to take my chance and try to be a fulltime panorama photographer -dash- mad scientist. I thought I'ld have lots of time on my hands now, to do all that I have been wanting to do for so long but couldn't. Alas, I am still too busy to do it all. Dang.
  As an aside, as far as I know, Avinity is still an interactiondesigner short, so if you're a designer with aspirations to influence how people spend a considerable part of their day, give them a lookover. They're a great team to work with.
• Since my Eolas hack got famous (wow, it's just a silly hack!), hoeben.net jumped from ~400 visitors to around 1500 visits daily. Amazing.
• Hoeben.net is yet on another server, at another host.

Something I've been wanting to do for a long time is taking IR panoramas

This panorama was taken using a filter that blocks out most visible light. The filter, a Cokin A007 89b, is transparent for IR light, and the CCD sensor on my S2 (like most cameras) is IR sensitive. Normally the IR sensitivity is overblown with visible light, but by blocking most visibe light with the filter you get to see the invisible. I have enhanced the colors in photoshop, switching the red and blue channel, among other things.

The Eolas vs Internet Explorer case has been getting a lot of attention lately, since it is almost time the patch is released in the wild. To make a long story short: Internet Explorer 6 and the upcoming version 7 will display plugin content differently from the 'seamless' experience we're used to. Whereas most plugins (Flash, Windows Media) will 'only' require an additional click to enabled interactivity, some plugins such as Quicktime and Shockwave result in an ugly dialog box when they are found on a page. The official workaround has authors rewrite each HTML page containing the 'offending' tags substantially.

Time is starting to run out! I need to make some new kites before the new kite season starts. First a Mio! Garu's pet ninja cat. Yesterday i've finally bought the cloth. Here are its proliminary drawings.

It's based on a traditional korean fighter kite + one kitten :-)

As promised. a couple of pictures of my new fish. Unfortunately, taking pictures of fish is a tad harder than i expected... ;-) So i had to cheat with one of them. I got it from the net :-/

First a picture of one of my blue gourami fish. Its dutch name is "blauwe spat" because of its blue colour and signature black dots (3). They are very peacefull, friendly fish. Except towards one another... I was a little worried about the little one (which i expect to be male) because the bigger one (female, picture) kept nipping at it. After a few days he got fed up and started fighting back. They fight dirty by the way. Nipping at the other when its back is turned! At the moment there is a truce only occasionally broken by a few catfights. Especially when i stand in front of the glass. They always seem to greet me when i get home (food, food!). I'm still can't be sure about their gender because the telltale elongated male spinal fin develops when they are fully grown (12 cm). They are now about 6/7 cm long. I'm going to add one gourami. Once i've figured out which genders i currently have. The ideal combination is one male and 2/3 females. 2 males results in vicious fighting...