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.

The more observant visitors may have noticed that we’ve just updated the design of the site. It’s not a drastic change, is the first stage of a series of updates that we’ll be releasing over the next month. If you have any problems with the changes, do let me know using the contact form or in the comments. Any comments are also welcome.

One change that may be of interest to web design types is that the new design uses downloadable CSS fonts using @font-face. At the moment, Safari 3 is the only browser that supports that, but that will hopefully change soon. It should still display with no problem in other browsers, just without the custom fonts. The font we are using is Fontin Sans, which is one of several excellent fonts by Jos Buivenga of Exljbris. These fonts have a licence which specifically permits use in @font-face declarations and are free to download. We’re using the font in our new logo and in the CleVR Stitcher, as the licence allows embedding in programs as well. We’re very grateful to Jos for creating this excellent font with such a helpful licence.

The CleVR Stitcher uses EXIF tags embedded in the source images to calculate how the images should be warped before stitching. There is a hopeless lack of standardisation in these tags, so we have to use several different techniques to support photos from different camera manufacturers. Sony is the worst, as they do not provide enough information to enable us to make the calculation. This means that we have to use a different method to make an educated guess. However, a bug in the previous version of the Stitcher meant that Sony images would not stitch at all. Thanks to a bug report by user benbreeze this is now fixed. I have also fixed another bug in the self-updater. You can upgrade to the new version here.

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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All of the panoramas on CleVR, as well as swfs and thumbnails are hosted on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). This has always been very reliable for us, but today they’ve been having a major outage. Currently it has been down for around 90 minutes, and they’re not giving an estimate of when it will be fixed. We have moved everything to our other servers, so things should be working fine. However, some people may experience issues where the old DNS information has been cached by their servers. Please bear with us, and it should update within an hour or so. Of course, if Amazon fix it then it will start working before that.

For those who are interested, the status information from Amazon can be found here.

If this image works, then Amazon s3 is working again:

Update 1510 UTC: Seems it’s all up again now. We’ll switch back to S3 in a bit when we can be confident it’s staying up.

I’ve just uploaded the first in a series of screencasts showing how to do various things with CleVR. The first one is about using the Stitcher, and you’ll find it below the cut. Let me know what you think, and what things you’d like to see in future tutorials.
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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.

Yup, another update to CleVR. Firstly, the AIR CleVR Stitcher has been updated again. We’ve also made it the primary Stitcher now. The Java version is still available, but we recommend everyone move to the AIR one now, as it’s a lot better. This version runs on Beta 2 of AIR, just released by Adobe. If you launch it from the stitcher page and you’ve previously run the AIR Stitcher it will update your version of AIR automatically. The Stitcher has few updates from the last version, probably the most significant of which is a greatly improved uploading system. It’s a lot quicker.

Secondly, updates to CleVR.com. Following on from commenting, added at the weekend, we now have tagging. So Web 2.0! You can add tags to your panoramas, such as place names and so forth. Give it a go: you’ve find the button for it on your panorama pages if you’re logged-in.

I’ve just pushed out an update to the site, which adds a few things. The real biggie is commenting on panoramas. Yes, you asked for it and you got it. (Well, maybe you didn’t ask for it, but others did). It’s pretty simple. There’s a box on each panorama page where logged-in users can add comments. You can delete your own comments or those on your panoramas. If you’ve enabled email notifications, you’ll get one when someone comments on your panorama. Let me know if you find any problems or have any comments, or just add a comment below.

There are a few other smaller changes. One of these is the single most requested feature – a link to view the full size panorama image. This is displayed on your own panoramas. If you click on it, then you can then save or print the full size image. Enjoy!

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.