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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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.

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.

Earlier today, new panorama uploads were not working. This is now fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience!

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.