Update: The CleVR Stitcher can now be found at http://www.clevr.com/stitcher

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The Stitcher is the oldest part of CleVR, originally developed nearly four years ago, so it’s needing an upgrade. It was developed in Java, delivered by Web Start, a system that I’ve never been happy with. I decided that the best plan for the new version was to rewrite it from scratch. It’s a Flex-based Adobe AIR app. AIR, formerly called Apollo, is a new cross-platform runtime under development by Adobe. The first beta was released earlier this month, and it’s a joy to develop for. I’m pleased to announce the first alpha version of the new AIR-based CleVR Stitcher. You’ll need a CleVR account to use it. It’s free, and only takes a couple of minutes to sign up.

The choice for the development platform will be surprising to many people. The idea of doing computer vision and image processing in Flash sounds like madness, but the advances in Flash Player 9 make it possible. While developing the CleVR panorama viewer, it became apparent to me quite how powerful some of the new features were, and the performance improvements in the new Player have made it feasible. The current version is slower than the Java stitcher, but there’s a lot more optimisation that I can do, and it’s certainly usable.

Currently it’s missing a number of features from the Java version, most importantly the ability to repair failed stitches. However, I’ve made several improvements to the algorithms, so there should be fewer failed stitches. The repair facility will be added in a future release, as will several other useful features.

Give it a try, and let me know of any bugs that you find, and any other comments that you have.

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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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!