GigaPanner

Berti and I have been busy coding for the last few days.

Although I couldn’t incorporate it into this blog post, we’ve created a standalone webpage that uses JavaScript to animate a Guided Tour of a GigaPan image. Click on Berti to have a look…

As with our earlier “Poor Man’s Zoom Loop”, the page makes use of code from both the GigaPan.org front page and orbitlab’s hack of the snapshot viewer. It’s all coded in JavaScript so you can “View Source”, copy, paste, and hack it to your heart’s content. There are undoubtedly more elegant ways of coding this, but we’ve opted for function over form.

Berti and I would certainly love to hear about it if you make use of this code in your own website.

Happy Hacking!

Although it had escaped my notice until today (when it first showed up in a Google Blog Search), it appears that the GigaPan team is once again maintaining a blog (of sorts).

I say once again because I’ve been told that in the early days of the GigaPan.org site there was a blog linked from the bottom of the homepage, however that blog apparently disappeared soon thereafter and hasn’t been seen since…

Until this past Monday, that is! The link at the bottom of the GigaPan.org page is back and the official GigaPan Blog is live at blogspot.com. Subscribed!!!

It’s good to see the GigaPan Team using a ‘blog’ as an official communications channel, but it’s really more of a syndicated press release space than a blog in its current incarnation since it doesn’t allow comments. Still, one-way communication from the team is a step in the right direction.

Want to join the converstation? Comments are open here at GigaPanner.com and you can always start your own blog. I’d love to hear from you!

There’s a brand new Explore Scoring system live on the GigaPan.org site today. Wow! This is exciting!

Previously the Explore Score was based on a scoring system that counted the cumulative number of tile views that each GigaPan had accumulated. The most viewed GigaPan (most individual tile views) was assigned a maximum score of 1000 and all other GigaPans were assigned an Explore Score proportionate to the champion. As a result the old Explore Score system suffered from a few very popular images whereas the vast majority of GigaPans had an explore score of single digits (many scored 0) out of 1000. Unless you were fortunate enough to have an image featured on the front page or slashdotted it was near impossible to get out of the single digits.

Well all of that has now changed! The new scoring system takes into account many more factors and new GigaPans can register a double digit score much more easily. I don’t know all of the factors that the new system uses (and I don’t expect a full accounting, lest folks try to game the system), but already it feels much more equitable and encouraging for new contributors. It appears there’s no longer a capped maximum score – at the time of this writing the most popular image has an Explore Score of 171.

It will be interesting to delve into the new scoring system and discover how it works. In the meantime, it’s exciting to see a host of fresh popular images.

Time to go exploring…

[8/10/08 Update: Just discovered that the GigaPan Team posted about the new Explore Scores on their 'blog' - no commenting enabled, so it's really more of a syndicated channel for press releases.]

Scott Telstad, a man who really knows how to make GigaPan Stitcher and Photoshop work together (as evidenced by this before and after pair of GigaPans), has just released three new tutorials on Screencast.com. The first is an introduction to the use of the GigaPan Stitcher with an eye toward fixing up the resulting GigaPan in Photoshop. The second covers the basics of how to use Photoshop to clean up motion artifacts that inevitably occur when subjects move between camera shots. The third adds detail about special circumstances such as when you need to make very detailed corrections or corrections involving multiple projected images.

The second two videos were a revelation to me. If one is willing to put in the work, gigapixel images can be cleaned up down to practically the pixel level using the tools in Photoshop. While I’m not likely to go back and clean up lots of my GigaPans that are already posted, it sure is nice to know how to avoid motion blurs and mis-stitches in the future.

David Holstius over at Gigapan and Blogger Demos has just posted iFrame code that can easily be adapted to embed any GigaPan in your blog or website.

Here’s an example of the code and its output. All you need to do is copy and paste it into your blog or webpage and replace the GigaPan ID and the Snapshot IDs. Simple as that!

<iframe frameborder=”0″ height=”400″ scrolling=”no” width=”600″ src=”http://remix.gigapan.org/unstable/gigapans/7379/snapshots/21010,21011,21012/viewer.html ” ></iframe>

On my Geology Blog I’ve previously written about my excitement about the Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project (YEPIP).

Well it turns out there’s news to update. As of about two weeks ago (I’m a little slow) they’ve got a preview of their progress available in a Silverlight DeepZoom format (requires a Silverlight install).

And how does it look? Awesome! It’s well worth the download of Silverlight to get a preview of the 20 stitched panoramas included with the shaded relief map of Yosemite Valley. It’s a tour de force demonstration of the Microsoft DeepZoom and Silverlight technologies, to boot. The zoom experience is even smoother than the flash implementation that runs the GigaPan.org website. I’m going to definitely need to do some deeper exploration of these new Microsoft technologies…

And if that main course wasn’t enough to fill you up, here are some additional appetizers/desserts:

1) Robert Scoble’s blog post (yes, he still posts to his blog every once in a while) about the YEPIP along with his wrapup of the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit. Particularly interesting are the videos he captured at the conference including one of Greg Downing and Eric Hanson, co founders of xRez Studios, demonstrating the YEPIP on a <drool>Microsoft Surface computer</drool> and another of Bill Crow of Microsoft Live Labs discussing the Seadragon/DeepZoom project. (Coincidentally, I just discovered Bill Crow tweeting about gigapixel panoramas this past weekend.) In a third video the xRez guys drop a hint that they’re hoping to have a hundred foot long continuous print panorama of the Yosemite Valley on display at SIGGRAPH later this year.

2) The xRez folks also have a Flickr gallery of photos taken during the YEPIP event.

3) It looks like a couple of the xRez panoramas are beginning to appear on the GigaPan.org site. I’m hoping many more will follow.

I’ll be very interested to see their final product, not only for the spectacularly innovative and envelope-stretching use of gigapixel panoramic imagery, but also for its application to scientific study of the geology of the Yosemite Valley.

I got the good news last Friday that the American Geophysical Union (AGU) has accepted my session proposal for its fall meeting in San Francisco, California, December 15-19, 2008. The session is titled “IN17: Earth and Space Science Applications of GigaPan Imagery” and the description is as follows:

Gigapixel panoramic (GigaPan) imagery captures highly detailed photographic information that can be viewed in a way that preserves a high degree of detail through a wide range of zoom (magnification). Recent developments in robotics technology, image processing, and web-delivery have made the creation, viewing, and annotation of GigaPan imagery far more accessible to scientists and the general public than was previously possible. Examples of GigaPan imagery can be found at Gigapan.org.

The GigaPan session at AGU seeks to bring together scientists and technologists who are pioneering the application of GigaPan imagery in the Earth and space sciences to share their experiences and results, as well as to introduce additional scientists and educators to the capabilities and possible scientific and educational applications of GigaPan technology.

I’m hoping we can get some good participation from the Fine Outreach For Science (FOFS) scientists involved in the beta testing, as well as anyone else who feels they have something to contribute.

It seems that the NY Times article has made CrunchGear sit up and notice GigaPan, too. Remarkably though, they can’t even get the link to the GigaPan.org site right. D’oh!

In the Technology section of today’s NY Times is an article by Anne Eisenberg about GigaPans and the GigaPan robot entitled: Sweeping Panoramas, Courtesy of a Robot. The article does a very nice job of introducing the capabilities of the robot and hints at the joys of shooting and viewing GigaPan photography. It’s a great introduction to the technology for those who aren’t already familiar with it, and the Times deserves credit for using their website to embed an actual GigaPan photo with the article – something that you just can’t experience in the print version of the paper.

(Unfortunately their web team was not so successful in linking from the online story to a GigaPan user page [Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the article and that is my user page] and another GigaPan image of Hanauma Bay by Richard Palmer.)