While I was writing the CleVR viewer and hotspot editor I often found myself running up against limitations of Actionscript. One of the ones that bugged me the most was the inability to export jpegs from BitmapData. Luckily, it seems that some of these limitations will be addressed in Actionscript 3, and an excellent demo at ByteArray.org illustrates exactly the solution I was looking for. Bring on Flash 9!

As you can expect, the most complicated bit is the code that does the actual matching of the photos. Some very smart people (not me: I’m talking about you, Andy) spent a lot of time making sure that it can stitch most panoramas automatically. When we started writing it, we set a requirement spec of stitching 95% of panoramas without the need for repair. We used a corpus of over 100 panoramas to test this. These were all random panoramas that we’d previously shot for clients, so there was quite a mix of stuff in there. However, they were all shot using a tripod or monopod, and they were all shot in portrait orientation, i.e. with the camera vertical. This is the way to get the best results, as it gives a better vertical field of view than if the camera was horizontal.

One thing that was common to all of them, however, was that they were taken by people (once again, not me) who are very used to taking panoramic photos. This means that they are probably “best case” panoramas, and it’s likely to have a lower success rate in the “real world”. There are however some simple steps that can be taken which will dramatically increase the chances of getting a perfect stitch.

(more…)

Hi there, and welcome to the CleVR blog. I’m Matt, the lead developer for Clementine, and I wrote most of the CleVR system. I plan to use this blog to discuss the development of the site and software, as well as other issues related to panoramic photography as a whole.

The site went live yesterday and we’ve had quite a few signups already. No one has created a panorama yet, but that’s not a huge surprise as I’m guessing most people will want to shoot panoramas specifically for this. Hopefully we’ll start to see some of these on the site soon. When we launched the site already had several hundred panoramas created by us as Clementine over the past few years. Hopefully these can serve as an example of what can be done with the software. You can use the search box up there ↑ to find them.

As I expected (and feared), as soon as the site went live, users started to find bugs that we hadn’t caught before. Some of these were simple fixes, but others may take a little longer. The bugs that I least like to find are those in the CleVR Stitcher. While this is very simple to use, under the bonnet it’s an incredibly complicated bit of software. So, I hope you can bear with us while we fix those problems. It does work very well in most cases (we’ve stitched hundreds of panoramas with it) but if you encounter a bug, we’ll try to fix it as soon as we can.