Jan’s Experiments

I loved my iPhone 3G most of the time. Now I love my iPhone 3GS most of the time. It surely is a happy relationship. Sometimes, however, my iPhone really gets on my nerves. I definitely don’t want to replace my iPhone with Android because of what I’m going to write about. I’m definitely not buying a Nexus One just because of this. Yet, after more than a year of being an iphone user (yes, I joined late,  I hire slow ) let me recap what I think are the 10 absolutely unforgivable flaws of the iphone user interface. If you are an iPhone user too, you might have your own list. Please share your annoyances (or links to them) in the comments below the article.

Flaw 1: Search Button Too Small

So I finally tried to implement my own automatic way of stitching panos. Don’t expect some sophisticated system, it’s actually pretty easy. I still have to click my mouse going from one step into another, however the point is that this can be fully automated and it did not require any sophisticated input. A chimp monkey could do it instead of me . I spent about 30 seconds with creating this pano which is far less than the time it took me to put this this blog post online.

Here’s what I did:
- Take the pictures, there are two things that needs to be considered when taking pictures for automatic panos
- 1. Leveling: The horizon needs to be leveled as precise as possible because the automatic software cannot determine the correct leveling for you
- 2. Precission: The pano head parallax point needs to be precisely calibrated, any misaligned is more visible in auto mode
- Load the pictures into a computer
- Adjust chromatic aberation and via a predefined filter plus apply any other filter you wish
- Export them as tiffs
- Load them in PtGui and let them auto-stitch, there is one important point:
- 1. Lens settings in PtGui: I don’t have the numbers, I’m running completely on auto stitch, that’s why I need even better precision when taking panos
- Save the result as jpeg

That’s it. 30 seconds of manual input plus 2 minutes of my quad-core gaming machine time.

And here’s the result:

Tram 7 in Prague

What do you think? I know the quality could be better, I saved it in a very low resolution to improve load time and like I mentioned above, it would help to have a lens profile set correctly in PtGui and/or calibrate the pano head more precisely.

Hint hint: Hey Google Maps Team! Why don’t you guys use this for implemnting Google Street View in the iPhone Safari browser?

I had one of those weekends when you need to try and do something new. So I finally went ahead and created what I wanted for a long time. Virtual Tour Viewer for iPhone. Version 0.1

Index page of the Virtual Tour

Spherical panorama view on iPhone

You can see it live by pointing your iPhone to this url:

Virtual Tour Viewer for iPhone:
http://bit.ly/6HEqD

Update Feb 1, 2010: Since I no longer update and improve the code I modified the application that now it uses a newer iphone panorama viewer from the 360cities.net website.

Please let me know what you think of it using comments below this article or by emailing me at jan dot vrsinsky at gmail d o t c om.

The app probably works only on iPhone and it has been tested only with my iPhone 3G. Any feedback and bug reports are appreciated.

I also want to thank waine a. lee and to Ryan Scherf, the author of jSwipe, for being an inspiration for me to write this (although they didn’t know ).

Read on: Goals, Roadmap, Technologies are below.

I’ve been toying recently with various representations of a spherical panorama. The stereographic (or little planet) projection has become my favorite for various reasons:

* I think it’s the most interesting way to represent a spherical panorama (much less boring than the usual equirect I used in this blog post)

* It’s also more practical because the image’s width to height ratio is usualy 1:1 so it displays nicely almost everywhere

* It’s definitely more creative because you can tweak each image quite a lot (you can rotate the “viewpoint”, alter horizontal compression, move the center, etc.)

Take a look at some examples:

Tram Public Transport in Prague, Czech Republic

Wind Harvester Farm

Mexico City

Click on the images to view interactive versions.

Please send me links to little-planet images you find or your own.

Jeffrey Martin, Bruce Pales, and Jan Vrsinsky drink beer as the sun goes down at the Dejvicka station pub beer garden in Prague 6.

This is a 270×270 degree stereographic, or ‘little planet’ projection.

The video was created by Jeffrey Martin (email him at 360 c i t i e s at g mail)

Google Street View is a feature of Google Maps and Google Earth which provides panoramic views of streets so the viewers can look around at any place that has been covered. What is the difference between Google Street View and handcrafted virtual panoramic photography as of today? What is stopping Street View to look as today’s best VR panoramas? What are the current and future technology constraints? How will Street View look in 5 years?

Here are two videos that I currently use to help me to shift my focus whenever I feel I’ve drifted away from what I want. Plus one longer and more thoughtful.

I invite you to follow my Mexpedition Diaries photoblog. A regular dose of imagery from Mexico, Belize and Guatemala I created during a trip in 2008. You can find photos as well as spherical 360 panoramas there.

(go to Mexpedition Diaries)

We started in Mexico City and headed north, then through Palenque to Yucatan, then to Belize, Guatemala and back to Mexico City. Here’s the map of the whole Mexpedition Diaries trip.

Here are very nice examples of a aerial panoramic photography I’ve found on the web. (if you cannot see the images you need to install flash). The links below each image lead to the original pano and the authors are also credited in the panos. I might post a guide how to create images like these soon

tip: hold the mouse button in the image and drag your mouse to look around

For those of you who don’t know there are two versions of the great Wordpress blogging software. Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org. Both are free. The difference is that the com version is hosted on wordpress servers while you need to host the org version yourself. I’ve recently moved to the org version and here’s why.