All is quiet at the moment on the blog front – at least for the next few hours in case you were waiting for our regular morning posts.
In our team we currently have Joel working on importing into Second Life so we can build a ‘city from a box’ and Richard working on the second release of our Google Map Creator – this time with Google Earth in mind.
I’m working on data visualisation in SketchUp for a forthcoming post as well as rapid HDR panoramas for giga pixel image creation.
So just to let you know that posts will follow but for the moment its back to the research…
With a couple of adjustments, compared to our first test images and post on capturing high dynamic range panoramas with the Lumix FX50, the results are now more than acceptable.
Pictured below in the main quadrangle of University College London captured using 108 images resulting in a 70 mega pixel panorama.
Click and drag to pan, double click or use the middle mouse scroll wheel to zoom:
The main building of University College London, pictured in this panorama, was designed by William Wilkins and constructed between 1827 and 1828. The building is centered on a Corinthian portico which is reminiscent of the British Museum, (constructed a couple of years earlier).
Creating a High Dynamic Range panorama is often deemed to require high end hardware such a digital SLR. While for high quality results this is indeed preferable sometimes the weight of the kit makes it impractical. As such we thought we would try a HDR view using a standard high street camera – in our case a Panasonic Lumix FX50 as pictured right.
Taken using auto bracket mode and comprising of 204 photographs it is possible to produce a 75 Mega Pixel panorama as illustrated below:
Click and drag to pan, double click or use the middle mouse scroll wheel to zoom:
While merely a test with known errors it does show potential for capturing those moments in High Dynamic Range when you don’t want to carry a heavy rig across town.
Lord of the Rings Online is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) set in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Released for the PC by definition being a MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online allows thousands of players to occupy the game space, essentially creating a living environment.
The trailer below provides an insight into the game:
MMORPG’s require large amounts of virtual land to both accommodate the number of players and to create a varied environment – as such they lend themselves to mapping. Games have long been mapped to provide a path through the various environments, often to be printed as part of ‘walkthrough’s’ in magazines (see our post on Ant Attack for the ZX Spectrum). With Web 2.0 it is becoming increasingly easy to provide maps of games as if they were real world locations.
As such Lord of the Rings Online has been mapped using the Google Maps API. The overview map is pictured at the top of the post, of interest are both the geographic features of the game and the level of functionality of the mapping interface. The inclusion of layers and levels of selection approaches a MMOPRG Geographic Information System – an interesting development in the mapping of games.
