Photography for Real Estate has a nice example of another Flash panorama viewer. Pano2QTVR is a paid-for app for Windows that can, among other things, create SWFs of panoramas. The big thing that these have over the CleVR Viewer is support for cubic panos. It’s pretty slick and the fullscreen stuff is good, though ours is unfinished at the moment, so will improve. Of course, what it doesn’t include is stitching and the sharing support (nor is it free). This leads on to another thing I wanted to mention: I have no problem with linking to our competitors - CleVR is free, so it’s not losing us money, and I don’t want anyone to think that this blog is just a place for me to push the CleVR stuff! So, please do add comments with examples of exceptional panorama software, whether viewers or stitchers.

Incidentally, the Photography for Real Estate blog has quite a few other interesting posts about panoramic photography, so it’s well worth a look.

While CleVR is mostly web-based, the Stitcher has always needed to be a desktop app. This is for a number of reasons. Primarily it’s because it needs access to the local filesystem so that you can import your photos. Also, it is processor intensive, so runs best as a native app.

However, it also needs to be tightly-integrated with the server, so that it can handle the uploading, authentication and similar. It also needs to be cross-platform, as we don;t have the resources to develop separate apps for Mac, Windows (and possibly Linux). The current system is pretty good - we use Java Webstart which allows us to launch from the browser, while giving us the access we need to the filesystem and native libraries. However, I’ve never been totally happy with it, and am always looking for a better solution. Luckily, there seem to be some on the way.

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I’ve just released a small update to the CleVR Stitcher. It fixes a couple of bugs, and improves resizing of windows and error handling. If you load it then you’ll receive the update automatically.

Kurt Shintaku, a Microsoft employee, informs us that they have added panorama stitching to Digital Image Starter Edition. He has a link to download the trial version. I haven’t given it a go as I don’t have Windows on this machine, but if it gets more people into creating panoramas then that’s good news. If anyone has created some panoramas with it, then they can upload it to CleVR to view and share it.

Back in July, at SIGGRAPH, Microsoft also gave a preview of PhotoSynth, which seems to be an interesting photo stitcher and renderer. It doesn’t seem to say whether it will be able to output the equirectangular images that we use on CleVR, but it’s worth keeping an eye on. It’s nice to see MS bringing this sort of thing to a wider audience, especially since Apple seems to be putting so little work into QuickTime VR.