You know, once you know what it feels like to be a yellow tulip, being packed in a crows of 700.000 people watching the Red Bull Airrace doesn't feel all that different ;-)

Here's a panorama I took this afternoon near the Erasmusbrug.

Today I received a package containing no less than 4 cameras with fisheye lenses. "Business must be going well" you might think... Not that it isn't, but if I tell you the cameras are from Lomo, you might start to realise it's not actually all that impressive price-wise ;-)

The art of Lomography is to 'shoot from the hip'. From wikipedia:

Lomography emphasizes shoot-from-the-hip photography. Over-saturated colors, lens artifacts, and exposure defects are used to produce artistic, abstract effects and are prized by practitioners. Others use the technique to document everyday life because the small camera size and ability to shoot in low light encourages candid photography, photo reportage and photo vérité

My short paper on using shift lens perspective to improve the experience of looking around in panoramic images in SPi-V is accepted to the Eurographics 2005 conference, organised in Dublin in august.

I'll be presenting my concept and implementation in a session along with other neat sounding papers. I hope I'll be able to impress people with some good looking demos ('if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit').

Tessa and I were invited to the 2005 edition of the Oostende Kite Festival. I was asked to bring panoramic prints of kite festivals to show in the Kite Expo. The panoramas were met with great enthusiasm, and I ended up winning a medal! Apparently, the city of Oostende was/is interested in purchasing some prints for their new city hall... Picture me very proud, and very tired in the train on the way back.

The Oostende Kite festival was great. The first day there was way too much wind, but the second day was brilliant. Tessa's new kite 'Garu' (Pucca's boyfriend) made it's maiden flight. Pictures to follow.

Emmy Huang points us at a long overdue technote about the infamous Shockwave 3d offset bug. For those of you who are blissfuly unaware about the bug, here's the thing:

Safari, or indeed any other browser using the Apple's WebCore framework for OS X, renders hardware accellerated (OpenGL) content 20 pixels too heigh, even over browser window elements such as toolbars or the title bar of a bare popup.

My camera breaking was especially irritating since last weekend was the IVRPA Panoramic Flower Power Weekend; A gathering of a small number of IVRPA members, visiting the Panorama Mesdag exhibit and several flowery events. Fortunately, Jan van der Woning lent me his D70 body so I could make some panos anyway.

I have probably seen enough flowers to last me the rest of the summer, but this is what it feels like to be a yellow tulip.

After attending a couple of kite festivals for a couple of years, last year Tessa and I were officially invited to attend the Oostende Kite Festival 2004. That was our first invitation, based on how some of our kites looked... We had a great time!

The Panorama Mesdag museum is currently hosting an exhibition of panoramic photos by members of the IVRPA (International VR Photographers Association, formerly the IQTVRA). The exhibit includes 4 images by myself, including a hyperbolic view of the Widnmills of Kinderdijk. That particular image was chosen to represent the exhibition to the public, so it will appear in some tourist magazines etc.

My mac mini finally arrived last friday. First impressions: man, that's mini!

I convinced myself I'ld need a mac mini to testdrive my panoramic viewing engine. Unfortunately the 32 Mb of video RAM is really the lower end of the range of what's acceptable on OS X for my stuff. OS X also takes up quite some video memory to achieve it's spiffy Exposé etc tricks. However, other hardware accellerated panorama engines are starting to appear for OS X, and they have a bit better performance even on this mac mini, so I should be able to squeeze a bit more out of it myself...

Just got word VRMag has launched their article about SPi-V and an interview with yours truly. Just in time for an update to version 1.2. I'm pretty chuffed with the article, especially since it contains some very flattering words by Landis Bennet (of World Wide Panorama fame), as well as Greg Downing: