360 cities VR Log

One of my favorite old panoramic images, shot in 2005. A bunch of lunatics playing football in the deep winter snowing madness, in the mud, in Letna Park, Prague:

Frank Taylor of the always-informative Google Earth Blog has blogged about this great image of a U2 Spyplane, captured in-flight on Google Earth! Who is watching who, now? :-) Click the images to open this location in Google Earth.

While the state of the art of Panoramic Photography has progressed in incredible ways over the last few years, there is still one type of photography stitching that is still a kind of black art: multi-viewpoint “planar” panoramas. Think of an image of all the facades on a street - while it seems simple to [...]

click to open fullscreen panorama.

Despite the continuing warming of the globe there´s still snow in La Colmiane, France

This thing is absolutely worth of exploring… Read more

Panoramas like this one, by Dieter Kik, remind me why I became so obsessed with VR Photography in the first place. click to open fullscreen panorama. Great work, Dieter. :-)

Via the Google Earth Blog - Google has added an astonishing quantity of 3d building - with photographic textures - into Google Earth. Simply fly to NYC in Google Earth, and turn on the 3d buildings Layer. Pretty amazing :-)

One of 360cities’ most prolific members, Hiroharu Shizuya, just pointed me towards his blog. It looks as good as all of his other work. If you want to view a translated (english) version, use this link. click the image to enter Hiroharu Shizuya’s blog. Hiroharu comes from Tokyo and he has created a fantastic amount of panoramas [...]

From the BBC: “Users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed.” Read more about it on BBC News. In related news, Slashdot reports: “Microsoft quietly released the first update to its IE8 beta 2 to its closest partners last week. This new [...]

Ok, who will be the first to build a 3d model / photosynth / object movie / inverted panorama from these thousands of images? :-) click the image above to visit the site.

We’ve been promised this for a while. Who knows? It could actually arrive, perhaps even before flying cars. Click the screenshot below to go directly to the site and watch the video.

This one looks pretty cool! It’s 7 megapixels, 3 cameras, 180 degrees horizontal field of view. Put 2 of them back to back and you’ve got a 360, they say. It is nice and flat, so that might actually work pretty well… although they didn’t have any examples of this on the site, so it probably [...]

Microsoft has ported their excellent Seadragon to the iPhone. It’s essentially a tile-based image viewer. That means, an image of infinitely large resolution can be shown, by supplying a set of image tiles for each resolution. Simple idea but extremely powerful. And in this case it is implemented very well — it refreshes very fast [...]

Thierry Blondeau has made me very jealous with this panorama of a cheese cellar. This looks like a delightful place, and I bet the cheese is as tasty as it looks…. click the image to open the panorama.

Jann Lipka just published this lovely panorama of Niagara Falls from the Canadian side. Click on the image to open the fullscreen panorama.

According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

I didn’t think Photosynth was an “end product”. It’s just a start, from the looks of it: From slashdot: Microsoft recently updated ESP, a virtual reality modeling platform that until now has primarily been used to model aircraft and flight simulations. Microsoft has plans to expand it to other industries such as real estate and urban planning, [...]

Via Readwriteweb. Adobe is working on a “virtual world generator”. In short, they take a bunch of photos, a la Photosynth, but instead of stitching the overlapping ones together, they figure out which ones are different but can be blended together into an infinitely zooming image. Words don’t do it justice. This is inspiring, crazy, and [...]

Hitta.se has released an excellent streetview map. The quality of the photographs is very high. While the images are not spherical, it doesn’t really matter in this particular application, and I’d trade the higher image quality here compared to Google’s streetview. Click on the image below to check it out.