Pocket Virtual Worlds: “The technology, a result of a partnership between Case Western Reserve and Bowling Green, uses a mobile device to explore photograph-based virtual worlds. There’s no GPS, nor Wi-Fi used, as I understand it, for the navigation of the worlds. It’s not clear how the datasets are knit together. Even if I don’t quite follow how it works, the New Media Consortium identified it as one of six emerging technologies in its 2008 Horizon Report. The end use?
This three-dimensional photographic virtual world is likely to be introduced to higher education and specific organizations within the next five years.
New non-destructive image editor: Naked Light: “Naked Light, a unique new image editor, offers a simplistic interface as well as advanced features; Naked Light will allow users to take advantage of non-destructive image editing. The application is advertised as re-inventing how image editing works, featuring node-based compositing and live filters, as well as a concept called ‘Infinite Resolution…
We all somewhat guess this would be coming around and tonight Microsoft releases Birds-eye View for their 3D Globe. They’ve taken those great Birds-eye View images from the 2D maps and using Photosynth they stiched them all together to create a ‘3D World’. Now of course this isn’t a true 3D, but if you’ve ever tried out Photosynth, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The Virtual Earth Blog spells it out quite nicely.
For background, its important to understand the challenges of visualizing our Birds eye imagery in a seamless mosaic the way we are all used to looking at satellite imagery that looks straight down at earth. Since all of the images are shot from the same point of view, it’s relatively easy to stitch them together in a convincing tapestry. There’s still challenges like doing good color balancing across images and rectifying so that buildings in tall cities don’t appear to butt heads, but these are pretty well understood problems. Birds eye images are a different story. because of the way they are captured, there is no easy way to stitch them at their edges without introducing nasty distortions. The result is that Birds eye imagery is viewed as discrete ’scenes’ instead of 1 giant tapestry. when you navigate to the edge of the current scene, the most appropriate next scene is dynamically determined, then displayed. Since Birds eye imagery is captured from 4 angles, we have North, South, East and west views of each point on earth adding another dimension of complexity to navigation.
In 3D, the same challenges remain, but are easier to address with client side managed code. the result is a user interface that borrows concepts from MSR’s Photosysnth to allow you to navigate more fluidly and naturally than what is possible with a javascript based client.
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The street level images are nice from a navigating sense, but I always feel like I’m in a canyon. These Birds-eye view images are much more open and having them available in 2D or 3D really pushes Virtual Earth ahead of Google Maps in my book (now how about making the darn think work in Safari?). One thing that jumped out at me was how good Microsoft’s building models look. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference between the Birds-eye and the 3D model. For those who can’t install the 3D add on, take a look at the video below.
Carnegie Mellon University researchers, working with NASA Ames Research Center scientists, have developed an inexpensive robotic device that allows any digital camera to take gigapixel panoramic photographs, known as GigaPans. The technology is being used by students to document their communities and by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to make Civil War sites accessible on the Web. The system uses a tripod-like mount to allow digital cameras to take hundreds of overlapping images of landscapes, buildings, or rooms. Software developed by Carnegie Mellon and Ames is used to arrange the images in a grid and digitally merge them together to create a single image that could contain tens of billions of pixels. Carnegie Mellon has also created a Web site so users can upload and interactively explore the panoramic images in any format. “An ordinary photo makes it possible to cross language barriers,” says Illah Nourbakhsh, an associate professor in the School of Computer Science’s Robotics Institute. “But a GigaPan provides so much information that it leads to conversations between the person who took the panoramas and the people who are exploring it and discovering new details.” Nourbakhsh hopes that GigaPan will help develop a community of producers and users. “GigaPan is not just about the vision of the person who makes the image,” Nourbakhsh says. “People who explore the image can make discoveries and gain insights in ways that may be just as important.”
“Classic situation: You are in a church with a beautiful stain-glass window. You want to take a photo but you realize you have to make a choice: you either take a slow exposure shot of the window, meaning that the rest of the image will be way underexposed, or you try to take a photo of the whole thing, leaving the window very overexposed, meaning you will not see any of the beauty of the window. What do you do? Well, normally you have to make a choice, because the sad reality of either film or digital cameras is that they have a very limited dynamic range. That’s where Photomatix comes in and opens up a whole new world of photography for many of us who’ve tried in vein to get what is not possible otherwise. While this is a somewhat labor intensive process that includes a lot of post photography operations before you have your image, the end result is that you will get images that are simply not possible otherwise.”
“In short, I do like Stitcher. If you want to create multi-shot panoramas (e.g., more than eight images), the speed efficiency is reason enough to consider using Stitcher over Photoshop. …
Because of the limited new functionality in this version, I am only giving it a 3 “A” rating. If you are new to Stitcher, by all means, I strongly recommend the program. If you already have a copy, it is hard for me to tell you to spend your money unless the fish-eye lens and/or HDR features are sufficient enough.”
Where Does Color Come From?: “Color is all around us. We look at a tree and see green, or we look at a stop sign and see red. The sky looks blue and flowers come in all sorts of different colors. As photographers, most of us shoot in color, but have you ever stopped to consider just what the heck color actually is and where it comes from?….”
First Thoughts on Nikon’s Big Announcement: “The long period of gossip and rumors about a possible Nikon full-frame DSLR came to an end this week with the announcement of the new Nikon D3 featuring the new FX format sensor (24 x 36mm). Nikon also announced the DX format D300 body as a successor to the D200 as well as a crop of great new lenses. Here are a few first thoughts on what these new cameras mean….”
The Guardian considers the commodification of photography… “the difference between a professional and an amateur is not that the amateur never takes really good pictures. It is that the professional will always come up with usable ones.”
REALVIZ Stitcher Updated for Intel Macs: “REALVIZ announced the immediate availability of Stitcher 5.6 on Thursday. The updated version of the photo stitching and panorama creation application now runs natively on Intel and PowerPC-based Macs”
Panoweaver is used by photographers, real estate agents, Web designers, project managers and even crime scene investigators to create panoramic images. It’s known for suppporting a wide variety of image input formats (JPG, TIFF, BMP, PICT, PNG, TGA) and types (full circular, full frame and drum fisheye), compatibility with a broad range of cameras, and a simplified approach to auto stitching images. “