this is a pano tool that i’m developing for possible use. it’s got some quirks, but i thought i’d put it up in case there was some feedback… i really think there’s gotta be a better way than quicktime VRs. is this the way?
a few notes:
1. this relies on the Flash 8 player for the blur. if you don’t have flash 8 player or above (you can tell by right-clicking on the pano and at the bottom of the contextual pop-up menu it will say “About Flash Player…” and the version you have). if you don’t have flash player 8 or above you can get it here.
2. this load images that total 2.6 megs. FYI
3. i am standing in the middle of bryant park in new york city. i am using a canon digital rebel xt. i am rotating in a circle. this is all taking me very little time. point being: the pictures would hopefully be better quality (ie taken with a tripod at least and paying more attention to exposure)
Nice job! The blur is a nice touch. I would make the controls a little less sensistive. i.e. I didn’t drag the pointer very far before I was zooming as fast as I wanted to. I see limitations in the future with being able to rotate upwards and downwards. I know Gary O’Brien from Charlotte Observer does lots of these and uses a 8mm lens to get a full 360 degree view which is cool. You definitely need some software tools to help stitch those bad boys together. Great start on it.
Agree with Nathan. A little too fast. What would be cool is some sort of slider/controller that gives you some sort of perspective of the direction you’re looking relative to where you’re starting… don’t know if a circular tab would work… but it seems that a linear drag bar doesn’t really give you a firm grasp of relative position..
Good work though… pretty consistent for no tripod.
Drop me a line… was going to NYC this weekend, but found a sweet deal to Montreal.
thanks for the feedback, please keep it coming…
nate & rob- i’ll play with the sensitivity. i know ur sensitive guys so i’ll try to tone it down. seriously though, it’s tough to see how different people use it. also, i would hope the photos would be much better quality, so they’d look better, but i really fail to see the benefits of the ‘look up at the sky, look straight down at the ground’ thing that quicktime does. there would be a benefit to it being shot with a wider angle lens, though.
another point is that quicktime has i think about a 50% penetration. that’s not good enough. flash is around 90%, so that’s why we’re looking to do it in flash.
also, as far as stitching the photos goes. it’s kinda peas and carrots… this is a different way of presenting a pano. when you stitch the photos, as quicktime VRs do, you get some fuckin crazy distortion sometimes. this is an attempt to solve that problem. however, i can see how it might be jarring to some that it’s not perfectly seemless.
rob, ur totally right on base about the directional indicator. in production now.
The 360 degree panos make you feel like you’re really standing in the middle of where it was shot. But I don’t think it’s necessary, as you mention Gabe. And the Flash penetration is unbeatable. I feel like there are some 360 flash options out there, though I haven’t tried them out before. One other thought, I would load the first image first before the user clicks to load, so they know what it is they’re going to load and how cool it is.
Ooh, and a little tween to ease the animation down until it stops would be a sweet touch.
again we agree nathan.
i feel that the quicktime VRs do put you in the middle of where it was shot, and the one you link to is exceptional. i feel they also work much better when things are in the foreground as opposed to the background as the bryant park pano is.
part of why i’m developing this is it makes it very very easy for a photographer to shoot a pano. often times a photographter might not have the opportunity to set up a tripod with the particular lens and everything that goes into a perfect panorama. i’m hoping we could get something back from darfur or something that we could plug into this… how cool would that be?
loading the first image is a good idea. i just didn’t want the full images loading for everybody who came to the dope every time, that’s why i put a little stop in the beginning.
good stuff
Colin, Rich and I were talking about you while we had coffee in Bryant Park last weekend before heading out to Eddie Adams. Was that a run on sentence. You were already in DC by the time we got there…
i’m surprised ur not in the pano. i could slice you into a couple frames.
don’t say i didn’t offer.
Nice idea – I like not having to use quicktime. But I agree it’s a little too fast and too sensitive. I shoot a lot of 360′s.. would be interested in seeing this as an entire 360 with sky and ground to see how the controls work.
it would also be a lot cooler if there were more freaks being freaky. and sound! gimme sound! gimme gimme!
but more seriously, folks, doesn’t it present an issue, if you’re looking to replace a single panoramic shot, that you’ve got movement between frames? it’s cool when you’re panning and you get sort of a flipbook effect with people walking or whatever, but i wonder if users would then think, “well, why don’t i just watch a video?”
i remember checking out one of those 8mm shots nathan’s talking about, of a guy’s apartment in charlotte, in which you could grab and drag the photo to change perspective. could you do something like that with this?
there were no freaks getting freaky unfortunado, vidinsky.
sound is certainly a plugin that can be done. the plan is to add it to things such as museum statues or something. you could rotate around it and zoom in on it and all that shiznit.
but as to your more serious comment (no seriously) i dont think it really presents any kind of inssue. the assumption that we’re trying to replace a single panoramic shot is flawed. i’m not looking to replace anything, i’m looking tocreate a new unique way of showing something in a way that people enjoy looking at it. it’s certainly pano-style, but i’m not really trying to replace anything.
we could certainly do the pano things nathan refers to (and whitney does quite succesfully) but i’ve said above the issues i have with quicktime vrs)
I kept trying to use my mouse to perform the movement.
I think that the audience is trained to do this.
you are on the money with this statement
“i’m looking to create a new unique way of showing something in a way that people enjoy looking at it.”
we have to think innovatively as multimedia storytellers — all of the time, it’s not replacing — it’s thinking of new ways to tell the story better — everything we do should be better than the last –
seth, thanks for stoppin’ in.
initially i developed this to be used by clicking and dragging using the mouse. here is an example of a pano of times square using this method. this type of pano actually seems to work better looking in on a subject (which i suppose makes in an ‘inverse-pano’?) check out this inverse-pano of a really cool van.
i agree that right now we’re at an important point where we have the opportunity to improve and innovate in our field. i’m looking to do things a way nobody is doing them, but everybody understands and enjoys. then we always have to keep in mind production time. i can put together one of these panos in under 5 minutes if i have the photographs.
yea thats the next step
–> training the normal journalist to think interactively — to know when to do the pano — it should be as instinctive to the photographer as anything else they do –
I have found that the interactive developer can put the mechanisms in place but that is only 10% of it all — the other 90% is training the content gatherers to think in a interactive way.
you’re so right man.
i’ve been pushing this on the travel and foreign bureaus hard lately. i’m not even telling them that we have to use it. i just want a photographer to try it. i want to see how it would look.
sometimes it’s like pulling teeth.
but i think we should have somebody coming through for us soon. i really want somebody to drop down in darfur/chad/C.A.R./etc. quickly pop off the photos, and be done with it. they don’t have time for a full-scale quicktime VR (or do they whit?) and we’re not really looking to do that anyway. this is built to be easy on the photographer while still dope to the reader/consumer.
when was the last time you saw a pano of a village in darfur?
the majority of shooters don’t “get it” — that multimedia expands their storytelling.
I talked at the knight fellowship last week with robert hood and travis fox — we were having beers and the topic came up — who does multiemdia “instinctively” as part of their daily work? — NAKA — TRAVIS — KASHI — (me if they’d let me out more)– not many –
that’s what needs to happen — photographers are on the front lines to multimedia storytelling they hold the key.
-sg