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!

While CleVR is mostly web-based, the Stitcher has always needed to be a desktop app. This is for a number of reasons. Primarily it’s because it needs access to the local filesystem so that you can import your photos. Also, it is processor intensive, so runs best as a native app.

However, it also needs to be tightly-integrated with the server, so that it can handle the uploading, authentication and similar. It also needs to be cross-platform, as we don;t have the resources to develop separate apps for Mac, Windows (and possibly Linux). The current system is pretty good – we use Java Webstart which allows us to launch from the browser, while giving us the access we need to the filesystem and native libraries. However, I’ve never been totally happy with it, and am always looking for a better solution. Luckily, there seem to be some on the way.

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I’ve just released a small update to the CleVR Stitcher. It fixes a couple of bugs, and improves resizing of windows and error handling. If you load it then you’ll receive the update automatically.

As you can expect, the most complicated bit is the code that does the actual matching of the photos. Some very smart people (not me: I’m talking about you, Andy) spent a lot of time making sure that it can stitch most panoramas automatically. When we started writing it, we set a requirement spec of stitching 95% of panoramas without the need for repair. We used a corpus of over 100 panoramas to test this. These were all random panoramas that we’d previously shot for clients, so there was quite a mix of stuff in there. However, they were all shot using a tripod or monopod, and they were all shot in portrait orientation, i.e. with the camera vertical. This is the way to get the best results, as it gives a better vertical field of view than if the camera was horizontal.

One thing that was common to all of them, however, was that they were taken by people (once again, not me) who are very used to taking panoramic photos. This means that they are probably “best case” panoramas, and it’s likely to have a lower success rate in the “real world”. There are however some simple steps that can be taken which will dramatically increase the chances of getting a perfect stitch.

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