The other day I ran into this list, where someone has compiled a list of his top 10 favourite panoramas. It’s a good list, and it has some of my favourites on it too.

The one I would add to my top ten list is actually quite a terrible panorama. It’s the one I took on holiday in Portugal last September.
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A few months ago I mentioned PhotoSynth, Microsoft’s immersive imaging project. At the time it was a little unclear exactly what it did. Via GeekVideo, I found a demo of what it will do. It looks very cool.

Sony has been revealed as the bidder who bought the intellectual property of bankrupt panorama and imaging company IPIX. Back in the heady dotcom days of 1999, IPIX became notorious for harassing members of the VR community, claiming that their patents covered any use of fisheye images to create panoramas. Particularly unimpressive was their hounding of Helmut Dersch, the creator of the open source PanoTools. Now Sony has paid $3.6 million for those and other patents, we’ll have to wait and see if they follow in IPIX’s footsteps.

Via paidContent.org.

Hans Nyberg of the always excellent panoramas.dk, has updated his Moon panorama page with views of every Apollo mission. These are produced from newly-mastered images recently released by NASA. He’s also managed to obtain the audio files of the conversations with Mission Control at the time the pics were taken and included these with the panoramas. Astronauts on every mission took image sequences which can with a little bit of work, be stitched into panoramas. When the photos were taken, there was no anticipation of current stitching software, and Nyberg explains some of the work he had to do in order to make up for that fact. The results are very impressive, and well worth a look.

I’ve been shamefully lax in updating this over the past couple of months. The reason is that I’ve been working on a big and exciting upgrade to the site. When this goes live in the next week we’ll be ready to properly launch the site. I’m very glad to see how many new users we’ve had even at this pre-release stage. Hopefully when the new features are in place it will be even more useful and we’ll have a lot more sign-ups and a lot more of you creating panoramas.

Watch this space!

Shooting a panorama is very easy, but surely robots make everything easier? NASA scientists have solved that shocking lack of robots by creating one that will shoot a panorama and stitch the photos. The Gigapan system is designed for shooting ultra high-resolution gigapixel panoramas, and will apparently be on sale as early as March, but the prototype shown in the photos seems distinctly unpolished. It looks very silly, but still it’s pretty cool. If it’s as cheap as they claim it will be, then I’ll certainly be getting one.

Post-Gazette.com via Engadget.