Well, it’s been a busy 24 hours. I’m pleased to see how popular CleVR is proving to be, so welcome to our hundreds of new users. There’s some great panoramas being posted too, which is even better. I’ve posted one of my favourites below the fold. I’ve fixed quite a few bugs and added some new features. Once again, thanks to everyone who has given feedback and reported bugs, however small. The most visible (and simplest) fix is to the fonts, which were messed up for some users on IE 6. One feature I have added is view counts: you can now see how many people have viewed your panorama, wther embedded or on the CleVR site. It only counts once per IP address, so multiple viewings won’t be counted. Finally, we now seem to officially have some notability, as there’s a wikipedia article on CleVR which has links to some of the articles featuring the launch, as well as some history of the site.

Panorama below.
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Today I committed the latest load of updates to CleVR in time for our official launch. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your enemies! I’m happy to see that our launch has already been picked up by several sites, including MetaFilter and my favourite photography blog, Photocritic. I’m rushing about like crazy at the moment fielding feedback and trying to patch up bugs as they appear. Please bear with me as we get into our stride as we get our first load of heavy traffic. One issue that has come up is the Hotspot Editor, which has a few strange bugs which I’m trying to fix. I’ll get the update out ASAP, but in the meantime most of them can be fixed by reloading the page.

Gizmodo reports that Lexus has been demoing a very cool panoramic video application. It stitches together video from cameras in the rear-view mirrors, to produce a panoramic view. This is to help when pulling-out of places with low visibility such as garages.

It’s finally happened! Earlier today we released a new version of CleVR. The will be several more updates following this week, on the way to our big launch.

The biggest change is the addition of groups. A group is a collection of panoramas, usually in nearby locations. An example would be several panoramas of one house or school. You can now easily navigate between panoramas. For example, see the open-top bus tour of Bath. The interface for adding your own panoramas to a group still needs a little work, but that should be fixed tomorrow. We’ll also be adding groups to the search, which should deliver more useful results. There are also a number of updates to the stitcher, mostly bug fixes.

The viewer has a few small updates, the most visible of which is the fact that panos now slowly auto-rotate when they first load. This is especially useful when the panorama is embedded in your own page, as it helps viewers see that it is more than just an image.

Thanks to everyone who has given us feedback. This has been really useful, and helps us make CleVR the best panoramic photo stitching and virtual tour software around. And it’s still 100% free!

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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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.

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.

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.