2007 on Stuff

Lucerne

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 12:12:03 +0000

August 2007 was the panotools meeting in Lucerne, here is a PDF of the talk I presented and some panoramas from the event.

Managing enblend masks slides (54kB)

Panoramists on a bridge QTVR (1.1MB)

Panoramists Taking A Coffee Break QTVR (1.3MB)

Taking Panoramas On The Wooden Bridge QTVR (1MB)

More Panoramas On The Wooden Bridge QTVR (1.2MB)

Toyota sculpture at Goodwood Festival of Speed

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 11:34:56 +0000

This is the 2007 sculpture at Goodwood, it was a series of Torii gates with cars suspended between them.

Design: Gerry Judah Structural Engineering: NRM Bobrowski Project Management: Peter Harris Fabrication and Installation: Littlehampton Welding Groundworks: Tidey & Webb

CAe paper - New methods to project panoramas for practical and aesthetic purposes

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 11:34:56 +0000

German, D.M., Pablo d’Angelo, Michael Gross, and Bruno Postle, “New methods to project panoramas for practical and aesthetic purposes,” in Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging, 2007 (CAe 2007), (D. W. Cunningham, G. Meyer, L. Neumann, A. Dunning, and R. Paricio, Eds.), pp.13-22. Eurographics Association, June 2007.

 Recent advances in digital photomontage have simplified the creation of extreme wide-angle views from a vantage point, including the recreation of the entire sphere (we will refer to these type of images as panoramas). In order to minimize the distortion from the point of view of the viewer, panoramas have been typically presented using curved displays (such as the original panoramas, by Barker, in 1787; or several cinematographic systems, such as Circle-Vision 360, still in use), and more recently with the help of the computer (such as the QuickTime VR format). Unfortunately requiring such systems restricts their use, and little research has been done in the representation of panoramas into a flat surface. In this paper we propose the use of several geographic map projections to project a panorama into a flat surface, both for realistic purposes (where the projection can be easily accepted as a faithful representation of the original image) and for artistic purposes (where the projection is used as an artistic tool intended for the creation of an innovative interpretation of the panorama). Finally we explore the use of inclinometers and map projections to automatically project an image from a wide-angle lens (rectilinear or fisheye) into a new image that is more aesthetically pleasant.

We believe the projections discussed in this paper will be useful to photographers, artists, and the designers of virtual reality environments, all of who might require the displaying of images with a wide field-of-view.

SVG enblend input

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 21:54:11 +0000

This is an experimental technique for preparing panoramic blending masks.

The usual technique for editing masks is to open the TIFF files used as input for enblend and modify the alpha channel. This is laborious and results in what would normally be temporary data becoming work that has to be saved.

enblend-mask introduced the possibility of using external mask files, this lets you delete the (potentially huge) temporary TIFF files, but involves much pasting in an image editor like the gimp.