Jan’s Experiments

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.

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)