Showing Panoramas on-line
If you’re anything like me, you at some point discovered a button alowing you to take panorama pictures. Perhaps you try it once or twice, and then you think ‘well, that was fun, now what?’ and promptly forget about it. You did, didn’t you? I knew it.
Finally, there’s a solution…
The main problem is that photo stitching software is an absolute beast to find, expensive, and often difficult to use. Then, finally, when you have managed to put together a good panorama, it’s impossible to show it to your friends easily. Scrolling back and forth on your screen is nifty enough, of course but… but… but… That’s so un-Web 2.0!
Luckily, there’s a solution. Think of it as Flickr and YouTube, but for panoramas: It’s free to use, has free stitching software, and all that. It’s best trick, however, is its panorama viewer: You can embed your panoramas into your website, YouTube-style. It’s all done in Flash, of course, and any standard browser with Flash built in (that’s 98.49% of you, but I’m just guessing. Proper statistics? Pah!) will be able to look at the panoramas without any hassle. Sounds simple, right? But the stupid truth of the matter is that there’s only one website out there that does this in any sort of satisfactory way…
The website in question is CleVR. No that’s not a typo: sure, they are clever, but the website is called CleVR. Confused? So am I, but then I never quite understood why Flicker is spelled Flickr, so perhaps I’m just dumb. Despite of my relative dumbness, however, I managed to figure out how to use the CleVR site: click a button to make your own panoramas.
The great thing is that there’s a lot of stuff you can do with panoramas as well. You’ve got your classic out-doorsy stuff:
But you can also get creative, like this kind of stuff:
Finally, you can add hot-spots to your panoramas, which means you can link several panoramas together. Try the next one, for example, you can click on some areas for more information, and on others to go to other panoramas. That way, you could conceivably show off your flat, for example, to your mom who lives in another country, and they can click on the doors to move from room to room. Nifty, no?
Anyway, I can’t encourage you enough to go have a look at CleVR. Upload a few panoramas, be amazed by the quality, and be elated that you’ve finally got a good way to share your panoramas on-line!
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Insights, suggestions and comments
I’ve never understood Flickr’s name either, but at least CleVR I take to be a play on “clever” and VR as in Virtual Reality. At least that one makes some sense.
Flickr is called Flickr because http://flicker.com/ was already taken by someone else. (???)
:)
Killer link, CleVR.
The software is kind of neat, but it strikes me as pretty much identical to Quicktime VR at first glance.
Did you notice any differences between using this vs Quicktime VR? Is there some great big glaring discrepancy I’m missing?
“Did you notice any differences between using this vs Quicktime VR? Is there some great big glaring discrepancy I’m missing?”
quicktime VR costs money possibly?
I think Quicktime VR is rather clunky to use. Besides, and more importantly, the user base that has Flash installed is VASTLY higher than the user base with Quicktime VR.
Fair enough, thanks Haje.
I’ve got qtvr installed, it’s just been on so long I assumed it was a normal component of quicktime. I checked and it’s apparently not.
Hi, Matt from CleVR here.
To answer a couple of questions: yes, the VR means virtual reality. When we chose the name (getting on for seven years ago) it was short for “Clementine VR”, Clementine being our company name. It was also meant to be analogous to Quicktime VR, as that was what we used for our stuff at the time. Which leads me onto the other question. This could really fill a whole post, but I’ll summarise.
We used QTVR for everything until last year, when we finally had had enough with its clunkiness and inflexibility. Apple seems to have abandoned updating it, which doesn’t help. Moving to our own Flash-based viewer had a number of major benefits. Firstly, it gave us a lot more flexibility in adding features, such as different types of hotspots. Secondly, it freed us from having to convert everything to .mov every time anything changed. Our server did handle all of that stuff in the background, so when a user made a change to a hotspot it rebuilt it, but it was never ideal. And of course, most other software doesn’t handle it that easily. The new viewer lets us keep everything as JPEG, with hotspots as XML rather than the hack that QTVR uses (Graphics codec – ugh).
Finally there’s the plug-in issue. Flash has by far the largest install base of any plug-in, and if the version is too old, then it has a very slick self-update mechanism. QuickTime, in contrast, is a real pain, and despite iTunes etc still has a much lower install base. When we used it, many of our clients wanted us to include our Java viewer too, as so many users didn’t have QTVR. So, we’re so much happier since we ditched QTVR.
Wow I can’t wait to try this, even though my journal site of choice doesn’t allow all flash for security reasons right now :( but I still got other means.
Speaking of stiching software, I’ve been using hugin and I will still continue to do that (although on an almost unrelated note I’m kinda mad that the free software PTLense is now charging but not that much) however I found a beta of an upcoming pay software from Microsoft. Acrylic Well it was code named Acrylic and thats what I used but I believe it will now be apart of Microsoft Design which also has a demo.
If there is one thing I can see is that the photo stitching is awesome! It corrects *some* visual distortion, color and uuummm….. I can’t remember the term, its where you image on its edges darken in a reverse circular pattern. It did a vastly better job of anything I’ve ever done in hugin. I’ve never mastered (or even done like in the sample picture) stretching of shots that don’t line up exactly but that program does!
That isn’t to say that it can eliminate parallaxing errors. It is for windows but check out the demo!
nice, but… am I the only one who thinks this is moving too slow? or is it just my computer?
Lau: If you want it to move faster, just grab it and pull it in any direction :)
I have been using HuginOSX and Xblend on my Mac and the results are quite good.
photocritic.org – cooooolest domain name)))
Great info. I’ve always wondered how they do that. I think there’s a lot of creative ways to use it. THanks, Todd
http://LaphotoSpot.com/blog
Don’t know much about photography. I have multiple panoramic photos of a hike in Sedona Arizona. All the photos can be linked together to create a 360 degree view. Any suggestions on how to frame these to make them look there best? Thanks
May I suggest you have a look at http://www.dermandar.com . It is also a free online panorama tool that you may like.
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