Tag Archives: Panorama

Microsoft PhotoSynth is AWESOME!

Posted on November 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

I have a confession to make. My favorite iPhone app is made by… (wait for it!) Microsoft! Yes, I said the “M” word! This program is awesome and easy for creating 360° panoramas, it’s called Photosynth. Actually, it’s more than 360°, it’s right/left and up/down and all the pieces in-between. I’m going to call it 720° panoramas, okay?

This is the last one I did, and it’s actually one of the better ones. Other than looking straight down, it’s pretty much perfect. Just so you know, the app calculates everything on the phone before you upload and share it. Plus, it tags it with your location. Once it’s on the website you can point out certain highlights (buildings, bridges, etc.). It’s amazing!

Direct link to the Hart Plaza 720° Photosynth.

To view them, it appears you need MicroSoft Silverlight or HTML 5 (at least the latter is why I think you can view it on an iPhone that does not have the app installed).

You can view all of my Photosynths at the Msoft Photosynth site.

Also, from the web site, you can specify where you were and what you were facing, I see that making for some interactive hopping from Photosyth “bubble” to “bubble”…

Direct link to the Deserted Warehouse 720° Photosynth.

The second one is a deserted building that I like in Downtown Detroit. It’s where I took the lost bride photo…

This is the first time I tried to embed them and it looks pretty good so far. Please let me know if you have problems viewing them. And I’m also interested in how they might view on your mobile devices.

Update: I couldn’t view the embedded Photosynths on my iPhone so I added direct links. Those seem to work fine.

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Posted in App Store

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YellowBird 360 demo

Posted on November 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

Here’s a demo of a panoramic 360 degree video, it’s actually more than 360 since you can look up too. Just click and drag as you watch the video and you move while the video is running. It works really really well.

yellowbirdlogo.jpgHere’s a link to it full screen.

The company has more information and demos at their website, which might be the longest URL I’ve ever used it’s www.YellowBirdsDontHaveWingsButTheyFlyToMakeYouExperienceA3dReality.com but then again it’s also yb.nl one of the shortest too.

I found this at pda-247.

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AutoStitch – Building Panoramas on your iPhone Automagically

Posted on July 11, 2009 | 1 comment

autostitch-icon.pngSo one of the coolest programs I’ve downloaded from the iPhone App Store is AutoStitch. It takes a bunch of photos and stitches them together. Alex Lindsey talked about this on MacBreak Weekly a few weeks ago. He spoke so highly of it, I plopped down my $1.99 and started using it immediately.

autostitch-screen-capture.PNGYou take a bunch of overlapping photos and it stitches them together, it does this completely automatically, there is no user intervention. You can use pictures you’ve taken with the iPhone but you can just as easily use pictures that you’ve synced with the phone. So this can work for the iPod Touch too, just sync some photos and when you’ve got some spare time, stitch them together. It does an amazing job.

I first used some photos that I shot on my Canon SD1100, it that just happened to be synced to the phone and did a great job of stitching them together. So you don’t need an iPhone, an iPod Touch with photos that you’ve synced works great too.

Above you can see a sample screenshot from the program where I chose 22 photos and it stitched them together (click it to enlarge). Remember all I did was pick the photos and a few minutes later it churned these out. All these photos were taken with the iPhone 3gs. If I cropped some of the edges of the photos, it’d look like I took there with a really wide angle lens.

Here are two samples:

detroit-cityfestjaggies.JPG
I chose this one specifically so you can really see how it pieces these together. It’s got gaps in it, (I think) this is the one I took 22 photos for the image; just the part with the people on the blanket in the middle is 3 or 4 images.
Click the image to enlarge to 2,500 by 800 pixels.


detroitcityfest.JPG
This one is more complete as I took many up and down photos to go with it. That’s the Detroit Fisher Building on the left.
Click the image to enlarge to 2,000 by 1,000 pixels.

These pictures were taken at CityFest in Detroit this summer.

I’ve used it multiple times and only once had a problem; it got confused when I did a 360 panorama when the same type of railing showed up several times, this was because all the condos where I live are similar so it really couldn’t match things up. There are some matching issues with color/contrast and people moving, but this is really great!

This software is well worth the $1.99! I think I got that much fun out of it in the first hour, let alone all the time since then. ZZZ

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Posted in App Store, reviews

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The Spaghetti Harvest – I Found It!

Posted on October 6, 2008 | Leave a comment

So I’ve been looking for some high quality footage of the Spaghetti Harvest footage for years, this still isn’t that great but it’s completely watchable (previously all I could find was some really crummy footage on the BBC site).

I saw it as a child, a local theater generally ran mini-documentaries (skiing, skateboarding, car building, etc.) instead of cartoons before a movie, and I’ve always remembered it. I knew it was a joke but it was totally deadpan; I’m sure to this day some people think that spaghetti grows on trees. Most people don’t even believe me when I say that there is a such a mini-documentary.

It wasn’t until years later I learned it was part of a (normally serious) BBC show they showed on April 1st, 1957 (which upset some people). It’s believed to be one of the first times television was used for a April Fools Joke. A lot detailed history, including the text of the narration, from the Hoaxapedia Article Swiss “Spaghetti Harvest”.

Direct link to the Spaghetti Harvest YouTube video (in case my imbedded footage doesn’t work). I finally found this since I saw someone stumble onto my site looking for info on it and decided to Google it again. But I’m still looking for a higher quality copy if anyone finds one on-line or knows where I can purchase it.

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Posted in food + drink

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