Panoramas Archives - Digital Urban

Sky-Watcher/Papymerlin Panorama Robot

Andy — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:06:00 +0000

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.

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Sky-Watcher/Papymerlin Panorama Robot

Andy — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:06:00 +0000

The post Sky-Watcher/Papymerlin Panorama Robot appeared first on Digital Urban.

Google Street View Extractor

Andy — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 08:58:00 +0000

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.

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Google Street View Extractor

Andy — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 08:58:00 +0000

The post Google Street View Extractor appeared first on Digital Urban.

Sneak Peek – Photoshop CS5 Context-Aware Fill

Andy — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:40:00 +0000

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.

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Sneak Peek – Photoshop CS5 Context-Aware Fill

Andy — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:40:00 +0000

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.

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Panoramic Globes: Rapid HD Visualisation of Place and Space

Andy — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:21:00 +0000

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.

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Locally Adapted Projections to Reduce Panorama Distortions

Andy — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:58:00 +0000

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.

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Locally Adapted Projections to Reduce Panorama Distortions

Andy — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:58:00 +0000

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

The post Locally Adapted Projections to Reduce Panorama Distortions appeared first on Digital Urban.

Caelum: Planet Panoramic Imagery Music Video

Andy — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:25:00 +0000

apoptosis from takcom on Vimeo.

Creating ‘Planets’ from panoramic imagery is one of the easiest yet perhaps most underused ways to portray 360×180 degree imagery. The music video above for artist called ‘caelum’ (Released on Aroundtherecords, JP) .myspace.com/caelumbridge aroundtherecords.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…

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