Welcome to the blog of Jan Vrsinsky where he writes about his experiments in life, travel, photography, games, quantum physics. Jan is the founder of howtoshoot360.com (jakfotit360.cz in Czech), the revolutionary website with panoramic tutorials, trainings, photo walks and workshops. He also works at 360cities.net, the best site for sharing 360° panoramas, and makes sure it rocks. In the past Jan worked as Tech Lead for the online team at Walt Disney Mobile Games Studio and Geewa (social online games) and co-founded DolphinGames (mobile MMORPGs). Jan is based in Prague, Czech Republic.
“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt
Contact
Google+: Jan Vrsinsky
Facebook: Jan Vrsinsky
Twitter: @janvrsinsky
Email: janvrsinsky (at) gmail.com
Photography
Jan loves capturing and sharing the awesomeness of the collaborative dream world around us and sharing it with people. He’s loved photography since childhood. He even developed his own black&white film rolls in a private photo lab. In 2003 he discovered the new dimension of panoramic photography and interactive images thanks to the panorama mode on his new digital compact camera. Since 2008 he’s been intensively focused on 360° panoramas and virtual tours. He has gathered professional experience with spherical panoramas thanks to his contract photography work, in his job at 360cities.net and during his travels around the world.
His experience ranges from photographing hotel resorts, blue chip companies in Czech Republic such as Skoda Auto, Unilever, Crocodille, KPMG, Prague Airport and others. He has taken photos in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, The Republic of South Africa, Italy, Sardinia, Portugal and Azores Islands. He has also created literally hundreds of leisure spherical panoramas during his travels.
How To Shoot 360° Panoramas
In the year 2011 Jan decided to launch a new experiment and to share his panoramic photography knowledge with others to put it to better use. He started organizing various workshops, panoramic photography photowalks and founded howtoshoot360.com and jakfotit360.cz. This websites’ goal is to explain and promote 360-degree photography via online tutorials and hands-on workshops in Prague, Czech Republic and worldwide.
The site features how-to sections, videos, guides for total beginners and other great pieces of information. 360° panoramas allow you to look around in them and therefore you are not constrained by the view defined by the photographer. Jan believes that panoramic photography and virtual tours are fun to create and that they can be produced by anybody, at any moment and with any equipment they currently own.
360Cities
360Cities is an amazing virtual tour of the planet Earth created by thousands of brilliant photographers featuring tens of thousands top-of-the-art immersive, interactive panoramas of hundreds of locations around the globe. Think of it as a mix between Google’s Street View, Youtube and Flickr. 360Cities features top-quality content from all imaginable places like volcanos, restaurants, top of skyscrapers, factories and even the insides of peoples’ fridges and washing machines. There are even many underwater photos of fish and coral reefs and aerial photos of people skydiving and flying helicopters. 360Cities is prominently featured in Google Earth.
iPhone Panorama Viewer
In 2009, inspired by the work of waine a. lee and Ryan Scherf, the author of jSwipe, Jan created the first-ever useful iPhone panorama viewer using CSS 3D HTML5 transformations that featured automatic rotations, inertia and iphone 3G support. There were other viewers available before that but they weren’t any good. Since then, this viewer has been widely adapted (and hugely improved) by many people in the panoramic photography industry, and it has been reworked and implemented also on 360Cities as an iPad viewer and the same technology was used later in krpano for mobile (although probably completely re-worked).
Science Café evenings in Czech Republic
During the years 2009 and 2010 Jan helped to launch various activities and to organize evenings for sciencecafe.cz. Science Cafés are informal and friendly evenings for allowing people from general public to meet top scientists in respective fields, listen to their newest findings and to ask them questions about what they want to know. The evenings were broadcasted by the Czech Public Radio (Cesky Rozhlas) every month.
The most successful pool game on Facebook
When Jan was working for geewa.com – an awesome Czech startup social/multiplayer gaming company -, he ported one of the most popular games on Geewa’s portal to Facebook, of course with a huge help of the core Geewa team. It turned up to be the most successful pool game on Facebook for some time, and in August 2011 it achieved 0.5 million daily active users (disclaimer: the game has been totally rewritten since then of course, Jan doesn’t think any of hi code and ideas are still left intact, however for him it’s still nice to know he once started this coolness).
The first-ever Disney ad-funded game and a game with in-app purchases
As an experiment, when working for Disney, Jan ported some of the newest Disney cell phone games to add 3rd-party ad-funding to support free downloads by users. He also implemented level downloading and in-app purchases to some prototype games. These were test-launched through Europe on O2 UK, T-Mobile UK, Vodafone Spain and others.
The first-ever massive multiplayer mobile game with a persistent world
In 2002, Jan started working in a subdivision of Illusion Softworks (creators of Mafia computer game), and later formed a separate team called DolphinGames, and launched a massively multiplayer game Sky in Fire for mobile web browsers and later for Java. It was, believe it or not, a flight simulator with ammo, fuel and unlimited number of simultaneously connected enemies. These were ages of super-expensive mobile connection rates from which we would get a provision from carriers and super-long page load times (up to 30 seconds) with a tiny image on them (as small as 70 pixels wide), and yet Jan and the team managed to create a persistent-world massive multiplayer games on top of that. Those were innocent and exciting times.
The first-ever mobile banking software for mobile phones
Back in the old days, when the mobile internet was very raw, and cell phones sloppy, Jan worked in the internet banking team of a small company in Czech Republic called BSC to enable bank clients to access their account via a technology called WAP. It worked very well at that time.
School, fun and games
Psst. Don’t tell anyone. Back at high school, a long time before the year 2000, and in the age of ancient computers, and no internet, Jan created a network packet encryption system with a dynamic key allocation that allowed students to play networked computer games on our school’s network without the risk of being detected by evil network sniffers that would alert teachers. Jan is still very proud of this achievement. :)
Jan’s Dream Log – Instagram photos on Tumblr
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