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

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.

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!

A few months ago I mentioned PhotoSynth, Microsoft’s immersive imaging project. At the time it was a little unclear exactly what it did. Via GeekVideo, I found a demo of what it will do. It looks very cool.

Sony has been revealed as the bidder who bought the intellectual property of bankrupt panorama and imaging company IPIX. Back in the heady dotcom days of 1999, IPIX became notorious for harassing members of the VR community, claiming that their patents covered any use of fisheye images to create panoramas. Particularly unimpressive was their hounding of Helmut Dersch, the creator of the open source PanoTools. Now Sony has paid $3.6 million for those and other patents, we’ll have to wait and see if they follow in IPIX’s footsteps.

Via paidContent.org.

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!