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.

All of the panoramas on CleVR, as well as swfs and thumbnails are hosted on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). This has always been very reliable for us, but today they’ve been having a major outage. Currently it has been down for around 90 minutes, and they’re not giving an estimate of when it will be fixed. We have moved everything to our other servers, so things should be working fine. However, some people may experience issues where the old DNS information has been cached by their servers. Please bear with us, and it should update within an hour or so. Of course, if Amazon fix it then it will start working before that.

For those who are interested, the status information from Amazon can be found here.

If this image works, then Amazon s3 is working again:

Update 1510 UTC: Seems it’s all up again now. We’ll switch back to S3 in a bit when we can be confident it’s staying up.

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.

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!

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.

While I was writing the CleVR viewer and hotspot editor I often found myself running up against limitations of Actionscript. One of the ones that bugged me the most was the inability to export jpegs from BitmapData. Luckily, it seems that some of these limitations will be addressed in Actionscript 3, and an excellent demo at ByteArray.org illustrates exactly the solution I was looking for. Bring on Flash 9!