Sky-Watcher/Papymerlin Panorama Robot

Below is a demonstration by Aaron Estrada of his panoramic Sky-Watcher/Papymerlin Panorama Robot. The system is based on a Sky-Watcher alt-azimuth non-goto telescope mover with a shutter release port built right in to the the head. The head is controlled wirelessly via a Papymerlin serial to bluetooth adapter module, all controlled via a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet (very neat):



Aaron states that the kit, all-in, is still less expensive than any other dedicated panorama robot on the market yet in many ways more flexible. For example, it can be programed to do custom shooting patterns, "gigapans" and even time-lapse. The software has a great GUI and integration on the N810. On top of it all, the Papywizard software is open source and written in Python, so if one has the chops they can hack it to customize it anyway they like.

You can see more of his panoramas here: 360cities.net/profile/hyperfocus, the majority of Aaron's panoramas are usually produced with Virtual Sets and Image Based Lighting in mind. As a result, most of the his panoramas are available as floating point HDR images.

We like this a lot, especially the bluetooth link to the N810 and the results speak for themselves.

Google Street View Extractor

Jamie Thompson has put together a handy little webservice that mashes up postcode geodata with the Street View Images API. In short, it allows you to get access to the unwarped Street View panorama and the underlying tiles.

We have put together a short movie to show the service in action:




As Jamie states, its handy in that it let’s you directly request a street view thumbnail with nothing more than a postcode.

The format of the request looks like this:

http://geo.jamiethompson.co.uk/streetview/[POSTCODE]_[WIDTH]x[HEIGHT].jpg

You can try it out here - just type in your own postcode.

Thanks go to Dr Chris Speed for picking this up, you can follow Chris on twitter.

Sneak Peek - Photoshop CS5 Context-Aware Fill

When taking panoramas or just general images, removing artifacts such as lens flare or unwanted objects to often a painful process. The clip below provides a sneek peak at a new tool known as 'context-aware fill' to automate the process. Watch to the end of the clip as the panoramic and desert sections are a must see:


In short this will make many photographers and panoramic artists jobs a lot quicker in future, thanks go to Steven Grey for sending this in.

Panoramic Globes: Rapid HD Visualisation of Place and Space

Old school readers will be familiar with the movie below, but with over 1400 posts some of our favourite movies have got lost and the following is one of them:

Panoramic London Churches - HD from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Amazingly easy to make it lead on to the following Worlds within Worlds clip:

Worlds within Worlds: Using Panoramas for Sense of Location and Place from digitalurban on Vimeo.

In short, embedding panoramas in a x/y/z space allows movies to be created where the camera automatically pans around a scene, it can be done in any 3D software.

Locally Adapted Projections to Reduce Panorama Distortions

The movie below is supplementary to a paper entitled Locally Adapted Projections to Reduce Panorama Distortions presented at the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2009.

The paper introduces locally-adapted projections for panoramic images. Defined as a continuous projection surface consisting of both near-planar and curved parts the simple and intuitive user interface allows the specification of regions of interest to be mapped to the near-planar parts, thereby reducing bending artifacts. The authors demonstrate the effectiveness of their approach on a variety of panoramic and wide angle images, including both indoor and outdoor scenes. It should however be noted that the ideas behind the paper are subject to dispute with the idea and proof of concept linked to the work of Helmut Dersch. Helmut is a well known innovator in the field and as he states omitting acknowledgments and references in high-level academic papers for sourced data, experiments or techniques is not acceptable. We concur completely with this view having seen various of our own labs work plagiarised over the years and action taken.



The link to the full paper has been removed in light of the update to the post.

Caelum: Planet Panoramic Imagery Music Video

apoptosis from takcom™ on Vimeo.

Creating 'Planets' from panoramic imagery is one of the easiest yet perhaps most underused ways to portray 360x180 degree imagery. The music video above for artist called ‘caelum’ (Released on Aroundtherecords, JP) .myspace.com/caelumbridgearoundtherecords.com uses the technique combined with After Effects.

Produced by takcom™ it is really nice to see 'Planets' used is such a way. Take a look at the tutorial on Flickr for details on how to create your own Planets...

Worlds within Worlds: Panoramic Visualisation

Worlds within Worlds: Using Panoramas for Sense of Location and Place from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Embedding panoramas in a x/y/z space allows movies to be created where the camera automatically pans around a scene. Panoramas are traditionally interactive, thus all our output via this blog is available in Quicktime Virtual Reality.

However, if you are going to display panoramas in a stand alone location, such as the front of an office or marketing suite, a movie is more suitable and thus the requirement to move panoramas into a 3D package.

If you expand this concept and embed panoramas within panoramas you can create 'worlds within worlds', as illustrated in the movie above.

This allows a series of panoramas to be embedded within a 'holding' scene and presents a looping movie suitable for large displays. The movie is just a concept but perhaps one that would work in a marketing suite or on display (?)

The movie developed the original concept embedded below illustrating London Churches in 3D space via 3D Studio Max:


Panoramic London Churches - HD from digitalurban on Vimeo.

The original movie is perhaps a better example than the 'Worlds within Worlds' concept - not sure - thats the thing with concept movies your never quite sure if they work....

Both movies can be viewed in High Definition by clicking on the HD icon.

Geolocate Comments in Panoramas: Street View in China by City 8

City8.com in China have a unique take on the use of panoramas to provide information about the city. Systems such as Google's Street View provide a blanket coverage of the road system but in reality are little more than 'eye candy'. City 8 on the other hand allows users to tag information inside the panorama - creating a simple yet effective way to geolocate comments and info on the urban environment.

The YouTube movie below provides an insight:



Take a look at http://www.city8.com for more info...

Digital Geography: Geographic Visualisation for Urban Environments - The Booklet

Our booklet: Digital Geography - Geographic Visualisation for Urban Environments has just come back from the printers and its looking good (even if we do say so ourselves). Printed in full colour the 10 x 8 inch booklets runs to 64 pages of insights and tutorials on Virtual Earth, Google Earth, Google Maps, Panoramas and Second Life.

With a focus on Neogeography, Web 2.0 and the emerging techniques for urban visualisation it has been written as a taster of the forthcoming Digital Urban book to be published fourth quarter of 2008.

The booklet should be available to purchase at the below cost price of £9.99 from this blog next Wednesday 26th March (ie after the Easter Closure). Supply is limited so feel free to drop us a email in advance if you would like a copy reserved, world wide postage will be free.