There’s a great article over on Tucows about how to use CleVR to create and share panoramas. In fact, I’d go as far to say that it’s better than our own documentation! Go and take a look, and if you like it then Digg the article.

It’s been a while since the CleVR Stitcher was updated as I’ve been working on some other important projects. I also had a much needed holiday! Today I have released a new version that fixes lots of bugs which have been reported over the past month or so. It also makes some hopefully significant improvements to the stitching algorithms. If you had problems with poor stitches in the past, then give it another try as it should do better. The improvements are mostly related to common problems in panoramas that have been shot by hand without a tripod.

Thank you everyone who submitted bug reports. They have bee very helpful. This release should fix all of the most commonly reported problems. See below for a list of updates, and important information on installing the update.
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On Monday, Adobe AIR was officially launched. Of course, we’ve been using the beta version of AIR for the CleVR Stitcher for over six months now, but it’s good to see it go 1.0. This means that we’ve also released a new version of the Stitcher, which uses the latest version of AIR. You can install it below, using the shiny new installer badge. It will update or install AIR for you if needed.

We’ve just released a new version of the CleVR Stitcher. This uses the new version of Adobe AIR, and also adds several features and fixes lots of bugs. If you download it, please do let me know what you think and if you have any problems with it.

The hotspot editor on CleVR.com has now been updated so it’s the same as the one in the new Stitcher. It looks quite similar to the old one, but it’s a rewrite done in Flex instead of Flash (if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry). It is however pretty much bug-free now: the old one could be a bit unstable at times. Now that it’s running off the same codebase as the Stitcher, any remaining bugs should be fixed quickly. As ever, comments and bug reports are appreciated.

If you haven’t tried adding hotspots to your panorama, give it a try. If you’re logged-in, you’ll find a button on the panorama page to edit them. Hotspots let you add another level of interactivity to your panoramas. You can create areas within the panorama that can be clicked to give more information or to move to another location. You can display text, images or even Flash files such as Youtube movies. Links to other locations lets you move around an area - for example, you could click on a doorway to move to a panorama inside a building or in a different room.

I’ve put up the CleVR AS3 libraries on RIAForge, where you can download them as a zip file, or use the svn repository.

The library includes a number of classes that we developed as part of the CleVR Stitcher. They include a set of matrix algebra classes, ported from the Java JAMA library. These let you do standard matrix algebra stuff, and includes support for singular value decomposition and QR decomposition.

There’s also some graphics classes. One is a subclass of BitmapData that adds bicubic and bilinear interpolation. Another is a class for calculating the histogram of an image, with methods to do histogram stretching. This gives results similar to “Auto levels” in Photoshop, or “Enhance” in iPhoto.

You will find them here. They’re released under the Creative Commons attribution licence, which basically lets you do anything with them, so long as you give credit somewhere. A link to clevr.com would usually suffice. Let me know if you have any comments, patches, or if you’re using it.