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.
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.
For the second World Wide Panorama event I shot the windmills near Kinderdijk. At the time I whined that the 20 or so windmille Kinderdijk were really nothing special (compared to - say - the Taj Mahal or the piramids of Giseh); looking out of my window I was looking at no less than 4 historic windmills in Schiedam... Since then Tessa and I have moved to a better part of Schiedam, and though I am more than happy with my new view the windmills just fall outside my viewing frustrum on either side of our house.
With all my complaining about Safari and Shockwave, you'ld almost forget there are other browsers with issues regarding Shockwave. Firefox 1.5 has been released recently, and many people are complaining about the new browser having issues with plugins in general; they just won't 'play'.
The deal was finalised last week, but starting today the macromedia.com website has been slightly restyled(*) and heads 'Adobe, formerly macromedia'
What this means for Director, Shockwave, and ultimately SPi-V is unclear, but I have no reason to believe things will change dramatically in the near future. Director is still Macromedia Director, so SPi-V 1.3 will probably still launch 'powered by Macromedia Shockwave'...
(*) As a tribute to macromedia, I am going to stick with the original Macromedia gradient I ripped for the Director subtheme on hoeben.net ;-)
Finishing up a SPi-V release can get a bit... boring at times. I mean, it's great to see people come up with creative uses of the engine, but staring at code to get that last bug out is not much fun. So yesterday evening I gave myself some time off to teach SPi-V a new trick I wanted to do for a long time now: splitscreen viewing
Today marks the one year anniversary of the initial release of SPi-V!
A year ago, SPi-V was the first publically available, cross platform, hardware accelerated panorama viewer. In it's first year SPi-V has matured thanks to your feedback as SPi-V developpers and panoramic photographers. The next release of the engine is only days away and brings many new features and improvements.
This event is cause for celebration ofcourse, and as a special thank you to the panoramic community, will be giving away free domain licenses.
Today's the first conference day of Spark, Europe's Premier Flash Event. I am looking forward to being inspired, and learning about where Flash is heading. Panorama-wise, I am ofcourse more of a Shockwave person, but for my new job at Avinity I am doing more and more flash work...
I took two pano's this morning, at Guy Watson's session about Actionscript 3, and Mike Chambers' talk about Flash/javascript interaction. Neither of them are up to my normal standards, but I wanted to make a point of getting panoramas posted within at least a couple of hours of shooting them. So there will probably be some stitcherrors in these panos...
Oh dear... Seems there may be more to the Safari offset problem/fix. After playing Shockwave 3d content (any hardware accellerated content, not just SPi-V), Quicktime VR file display with an offset.
To repro, first open this link on Apple.com showing Times Square. Notice how it displays where it should, horizontally centered in the frame.
Now open a Shockwave 3d piece in the same window (such as Xonko.com's Cooper Mini). Hurray! Using the latest version of Safari, that displays as it should as well.
My new exhibition at Galerie in de Weg opens this sunday, and lasts through januari. Last year, I had 2 shorterexhibits at the same gallery, and I'm quite psyched I'm getting the chance to do it again (thanks Ianus and Anneke). This year's exhibition is entitled 'expositie van 4 kanten' (which is a pun that does not really translate well).
Tessa is always trying to convince me that I have enough panoramas to show, but being my masochistic self I decided I needed all new prints and all new panoramas. So this weekend I held a full out stitchathon, working my way through what seemed like endless piles of unstitched panoramas, searching for that set of panoramas that I could do a square projection of (without using the same hyperbolicprojection over and over again). So apart from the prints, I ended up with some rather nice new fullscreen panoramas too - though totally unrelated from eachother. Click each of the images below for the fullscreen panorama
REALVIZ and fieldOfView jointly 
