Last weekend I attended the rallyshow event in Hradec Kralove here in Czech Republic. I had a chance to take a pano of the interior of one of the racing cars of Hroch Rally Team (Chladek & Tintera):
Peugeot 207 S2000 Rally Car Interior in Czech Republic
And here’s the whole Hroch Rally Team 
Hroch Rally Team in Czech Republic
Here are some of my latest 360 panoramas from the city of Prague, Czech Republic.
"Obora" Lookout Tower in Prague Zoo
View a virtual tour of Prague
Welcome to the Czech Beer Fest: A selection of the best from Czech breweries, Czech chefs, butchers and bakers for you. Taste more than 70 brands of Czech beer, 200 girls and boys in Czech national costumes, unrepeatable atmosphere in one of three large-scale tents, specialties of top chefs of famous Czech restaurants.
Servers in Tent 2 (Czech Beer Festival 2010) in Czech Republic
Beer Taps in Tent 3 (Czech Beer Festival 2010) in Czech Republic
Click to open a virtual tour of the Czech Beer Festival.
Bhautik Joshi, the crazy guy who put a 18-55mm SLR lens on his iphone, has created another awesome do-it-yourself device. He uses a fisheye peephole as the main lens element and a decapitated soda can as the lens body. You can attach the whole thing to a SLR camera. Amazing!!! The quality is of course still awful but the thing is that you now can make fisheye photos with a lens that costs virtually nothing. Just take your crappy old DSLR camera, attach this lens, take 4 images at a place and stitch them together. This is I believe another step closer to making spherical panoramic photography mainstream. Good job Bhautik!
You can read the whole guide how to build it and more screenshots in the author’s article: The fisheye tin cam
The fisheye tin cam sample images
The fisheye tin cam lens
(I found this article originally at PetaPixel, thanks!)
Here are some of the interesting panoramas I’ve taken in South Africa.
This accomodation is called Sani Top Challet, and inside there is actually the highest pub in Africa, or so they claim. The altitude is 2865m above sea level here. To the left of the building you can see the Lesotho border post (75% of tourists that come to Lesotho use this gate to enter the country).
Sani Top Chalet in South Africa
This was absolutely pleasant experience. Look at the landscape around … one of the best places in the world I’ve seen for riding a horse. The pano was taken during a short break we took to enjoy the landscape around. Make sure you go fullscreen…
Khotso Horse Ride Break in South Africa
a local football game in Himeville
Local Football Game in Himeville in South Africa
Sani Pass (a picturesque valley that stretches between Republic of South Africa and Lesotho)
Sani Pass in South Africa
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:
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.
More…
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?
More…
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