Adobe released an update for Shockwave yesterday, with better support for Vista.
In my cursory test of the new release on a machine using Vista, it seems that hardware acceleration of Shockwave 3d content is working again! SPi-V content now works like you'ld expect it; nice and smooth.
Yesterday I released the first beta of SPi-V 1.4, adding support for (streaming) directional audio, amongst other things. Here's a demo showing streaming directional audio.
Note how the directional audio not only changes in volume as you move past, but the sound actually travels from left to right (and when you are looking 180 degrees from the sound source, the left and right channel are actually reversed!).
Last week I visited Photokina, the largest photography tradefair in the world. The IVRPA was offered a booth at the fair, and part of the deal that got us the booth was us covering the event in interactive, fullscreen panoramas. I set up a special site for this event, and to this date we have about 60 panoramas up (50 of which were posted during the event).
Like last year, I will be joining Andras Frenyo (and friends), capturing the Sziget festival in fullscreen panoramas. Sziget in Budapest, Hungary, is probably the largest pop festival in Europe.
The festival started today, but I won't be joining the gang until saturday... There are already some fullscreen pre-festival panoramas up on the Sziget 2006 page. Hang in there guys! And keep some venues for me to cover ;-) But even if you beat me to all the nice spots, I'll bring my IR lens and have another view on things anyway. And I'm bringing a surprise!
If you've wondered why I have been so quiet, that's because I have been far too busy doing far too many things.
One of those things is building a new site for the IVRPA, which I just released to the world!
The new IVRPA website project started - ahem - more than a year back. Since then, I joined the IVRPA Board of Directors, and the new website has been my brainchild since. Like hoeben.net, and the SPi-V developers' site before, I based the IVRPA website on Drupal. But for the IVRPA site, I've had to take my Drupal knowledge to a whole new level. From advanced theming to lots of smaller and bigger patches contributed to the Drupal projects/modules that make the IVRPA site tick and even a small module of my own... To keep up with developments of the site, I recommend keeping an eye on my developer blog over at the new site.
Yesterday, Tessa and I joined some of her colleagues at a very enjoyable 'Parade'. 'De Parade' marks the start of the theatre season in the Netherlands. A group of theatre performers travels from city to city in a couple of weeks to try out their new theatre programmes.
Since I'm still somewhat in love with my IR fisheye lens, I decided to do an IR shot of the sunset (pano). The IR filter blocks out most light, so with the waning light of the setting sun and at ISO 100, I ended up with an exposure of more than a second. I like the ghosting of the people in motion, while the rest of the image is sharp. The version above is what's called a 'false color' version; I have altered the colors so the sky is blue again, even though most blue light is blocked by the filter. For comparisson, here's the 'true color' version, which is more like what the camera saw.
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.
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.
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.
Adobe released an update for Shockwave yesterday, with better support for Vista.
