I've been working on an automated panorama head for a while (more about that in a later post), and wanted to see how far I could push it. This weekend, the Red Bull Air Race in Rotterdam provided an interesting view, and after a lot of stitching my very first gigapixel panorama was the result.

Click the image for a zoomable version.

In november, VRMag returned with a brand new issue. Marco Trezzini chose one of my Sziget panoramas for the interactive index of the issue. The issue got a very nice mention on boingboing. If you just glance over the article on boingboing, it is almost as if John Gaeta is talking about my panorama ;-)

Click the image for the interactive panorama.

This post is a reprint of the VRMag article, including some bonus images.

I warned you about this: I am getting famous! I got featured on the front page of the blog of Dutch technology lifestyle magazine Bright!

Here's a couple of videos of me at this summer's panorama conferences, showing the setup I brouight to Bright, as well as some others:

When I've been working too hard on projects that take a lot of energy, I often indulge myself in doing something completely different (though Tessa would argue that it's still behind a computer, so it is not all that different).

Ian Wood showed me some nice workflow tools for Aperture, and I wanted to do something similar with Bridge. Bridge, unlike Adobe Lightroom, is relatively easily extensible; many of Adobe's own applications use javascript to plug into Bridge, and they have a very nice SDK. There's even an embedded browser available in Bridge, based on Opera.

For the third year, I joined Andras Frenyo shooting panoramas at the Sziget Festival in Budapest, Hungary.

I arrived at the third day (the Panotools meeting in Lucerne coincided with the festival), so I missed out on Within Temptation, the only Dutch act of the festival; Even with only one Dutch act, I was somewhat surprised at the number of Dutch people at the festival.

There are so many stories still to tell about Tessa's and my trip, but as an intermezzo I shot this panorama at the Rotterdam Summer Carnival:

Click the image for the interactive panorama.

Today's Rotterdam Summer Carnival attracted just under a million spectators. This makes the Rotterdam carnival one of the largest in Europe.

After climbing 545 meter over an 13 km hike, I asked Tessa to marry me. Fortunately, Tessa said 'yes', under the watchful eyes of three marmots. Click the image to enjoy the moment (and to find the marmots).

Gliese 581 C, an Earthlike planet spotted outside our solar system is the first found that could support liquid water and harbor life, scientists recently announced.

Back in december last year, I participated in the first Bright Live event; an 'innovative lifestyle' event organised by Dutch lifestyle magazine Bright.

At the fair, I demonstrated my first foray in panoramic video; the panamorphosis table. This setup combines current technology (hd video, beamers) and very old tricks (cylindrical mirrors) to share a panoramic experience with more people. It is still very much a work in progress, and Ianus and I barely got it working in time for Bright Live.

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.