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.

I’ve just pushed out an update to the CleVR Stitcher which is probably the biggest improvement yet. Loads more features, loads of bugs fixed and a much nicer interface. You will find all the details here: CleVR panoramic photo Stitcher. As always, it’s totally free. Let me know what you think.

I decided to enter it into the Adobe AIR Developer Derby. It’s hard to judge its chances, but I’d love to win that squishy stress ball. If they’re going on innovation, I’d say they’d be hard-pressed to find an AIR app that is pushing the boundaries more than this. In terms of using AIR technologies, we’re using almost all of them! We’ll wait and see…

Yesterday’s update to the CleVR Stitcher has a number of new features. One of these is image enhancement for the finished panorama. This corrects under- or over-exposed images, and works in a similar way to “Auto levels” in Photoshop, or Enhance in iPhoto. See below for more details and a demo.
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For the second release of utility code from CleVR Stitcher, the Adobe AIR panoramic photo stitcher, I’m offering our InterpolatedBitmapData class.
The class adds support for bicubic and bilinear interpolation to the Actionscript BitmapData class. It adds two public methods - getPixelBilinear and getPixelBicubic. You can call these with sub-pixel coordinates and it will interpolate the RGB value for that point. This should be useful for anyone doing more complex transformations than those offered by the Matrix class. I hope it will be useful to someone. Do let me know if you’re using it. As ever, a link back to clevr.com is appreciated but not required.

Download it as part of the CleVR Actionscript Library

While developing the CleVR Stitcher, I needed to do quite a bit of linear algebra. I was disappointed to find that there was no Actionscript library out there for doing this, so I had to write my own. Rather than doing it from scratch, I decided to start with NIST’s Java Matrix library: JAMA, which is in the public domain.

For the benefit of anyone else needing to do stuff like this, I’m releasing the library. It’s not a full port, as I only implemented the stuff that I need. It does however support most regular operations for manipulating real matrices. As well as the normal algebra stuff, it includes classes for singular value decomposition and QR decomposition. I hope others find it useful. Let me know if you’re using it. A link back to clevr.com from your site would be appreciated but is not required.

Download it as part of the CleVR Actionscript Library

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.

A few minutes ago, we reached a small milestone: our 1000th panorama, and it’s a beaut. See it below. We’ll soon be on our thousandth user too, which is nice. We have some big news coming up over the next week, so stay tuned.

A couple of less positive things: we appear to have a bug in the stitcher which is causing problems for Mac users with PowerPC. Intel-based Macs seem to be unaffected, as does Windows. This seems to have crept in when we updated our code-signing certificates a few days ago. We’re working on it and hope to have a solution soon.

Update: The PowerPC problem is now fixed. G3, G4 and G5 users rejoice!

Likewise, there is a problem with signups for users with Yahoo email addresses. The Yahoo servers don’t seem to be playing nicely with our password emails, with a lot of them still trying to be delivered. We’re in contact with Yahoo and trying to get it resolved. In the meantime, either try to sign up with a different address, or if you use a Yahoo address and you don’t receive a mail, contact us with the username and email that you used to sign up and we’ll sort it out for you.

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!

I’ve been shamefully lax in updating this over the past couple of months. The reason is that I’ve been working on a big and exciting upgrade to the site. When this goes live in the next week we’ll be ready to properly launch the site. I’m very glad to see how many new users we’ve had even at this pre-release stage. Hopefully when the new features are in place it will be even more useful and we’ll have a lot more sign-ups and a lot more of you creating panoramas.

Watch this space!