Guest Post: Best Techniques for 360 Panorama
Tom Pace takes incredible panoramas.
It’s not a stretch to say that Tom has taken some of the most amazing panoramas we’ve seen and we’ve enjoyed sharing several of his panoramas from the @360Panorama Twitter account, as well as feature a few in Noteworthy on the 360VERSE page. Last week, at the prompt of a comment from another 360 Panorama user, Tom crafted a blog post to share his secrets for how he creates such memorable panoramas.
Below you’ll find an excerpt of the post (view the original post here) Tom originally created for his blog The Edge of Thought. We think you’ll enjoy it:
Best Techniques for 360 Panorama
Getting a satisfying 360-degree photo is easy, but to add that little extra bit of quality, I’ve come up with a handful of techniques that can be used to improve the finished result.
The following are the most important techniques to solve the most significant problems I found occurring in most panoramas:
- Achieving the best camera exposure levels in the first shot
- Moving so the images blend together properly, primarily to fix broken horizons
1. Get The Best Exposure
Determining the best exposure can be a bit of a guess, but the best way to get it is aiming the camera toward the brightest point in the 360 environment for light or average environments … obviously the sun, if you’re outside, or some light wall inside, etc. In a darker environment, aim the camera at the darkest place so it compensates and the rest of the 360 view is easier to see, not all black. And then, start capturing, and quickly spin around and find any places in the environment that you really like and want to see in the panorama, and if they appear way too dark or too light, then you might want to restart, and aim the camera a bit off from whatever you aimed at initially. Then you can either assume the camera has a good initial exposure and continue to make the panorama or you can do a quick spot check again. I usually do one single test and then do the panorama.. Although, I would have done a third on Lake Louise if I had the time (I was annoying family members who were also in the canoe, requesting them to spin the boat around! haha..)
Here are two pairs of panoramas with separate light/dark versions, Lake Louise and Grotto Mountain Pond:
Lake Louise light (the water texture is much more detailed than the dark version, but the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise is farther and harder to see here… the dark one is closer)
Grotto Mountain Pond dark (easy-to-see mountain on right, almost total black mountain on left)
This technique was important for the panorama in the field with mountains in Canmore (http://360.io/HkKLEB). I did 2 or 3 spot checks before I finished the field-with-mountains, because there is a huge amount of dynamic range.
First I aimed at the sun, so the sky was darker and all the clouds were detailed, but the mountains turned totally black.
Then tried lighter a bit, once or twice, until I liked the balance between bright sky clouds and the dark mountains. This was used by Occipital in the 360verse, and a viewer commented on it which inspired me to write this blog post.
2. Preventing Broken Horizons
Watch the grid when starting and try to capture the horizon in your first image, rather than a total sky image or total ground image. Then slowly angle the device up and down to get the sky and ground for this initial horizon image, then return to the horizon and start slowly turning around in a circle. Try have the new new image overlap the captured images as much as possible. Spinning your body at a slower speed helps.
This action will greatly reduce the chance of a broken horizon. It’s much more tricky to get the horizon at the end of the 360 spin to be unbroken. I think it’s a bit of luck, but it’s also about keeping the iPhone as still as possible while spinning.
Start spinning slowly again, capturing the sky and ground in the same manner. I haven’t determined if it makes a difference to capture only the sky in a spin and the ground in a separate spin, or if the second spin can capture both sky and ground by angling up and down as you spin the second time around.
Quick Bonus Tips!
- Keep the iPhone as close to you as possible, right in front of your face. Holding it at arms length can confuse it for certain near-by objects. This tip came directly from Occipital after I finally asked for help in late February 2011.
- Also don’t lower it down to your chest or waist when capturing the ground, and don’t stick it way up above your head when capturing the sky. Only rotate it up and down, right in front of your face, and spin your body to get the side images.
Now I’ve created almost 30 panoramas, some uploaded and public, and feel great confidence in the app, and my own improved use of it. I hope this info can help you get even more enjoyment from the app.
A brief bio from Tom Pace:
I am a technology consultant. My experience was originally in desktop web apps, but my focus has changed to prioritize the user experience and development on mobile devices in recent years. I have completed projects and have more in development on iOS, and Android, for myself and clients around North America and the Caribbean.
Working independently for several years, I enjoy the experience of entrepreneurship. Being independent demands me to keep a strict focus on growth, being proactive, keeping a constant positive attitude, and often thinking outside the box.
I have an insatiable desire to explore the bleeding-edge boundaries of technology, and to explore the wide and wonderful natural world. Being out in the natural world is one of the best sources of creativity and inspiration.
You can see more of Tom’s panoramas on his public profile.
New Feature: Comments
Since the release of 360 Panorama, users have been requesting the ability to post and receive comments on their panoramas. We’ve been listening!
We are proud to announce support for comments on all uploaded 360 Panoramas.
With the addition of comments, we’re releasing an additional new feature in 360 Panorama: Your activity stream. As we integrate even more functionality into the app, we know it will be important to see your latest activity in one location. That’s why we built your activity stream right into the app. With the receipt of your first notification, you will see your Occipital account icon in the top right corner. When you receive a comment or other notification, the notification bubble next to your icon will turn red. Just press your icon to view your account and activity stream.
Easily reply to comments from within the app by selecting the comment and entering your response.
Comments aren’t just an in-app feature. Friends, family, and the world (for your public panoramas) can view and share comments in the web viewer as well.
And now for even more good news: Comments and the activity stream are just the beginning. We’re hard at work building some great new features for 360 Panorama and we can’t wait to share them with you. It’s just going to keep getting better and better.
4 days of of 360 Panorama for free = 1.4 million downloads
Back in August, we did a 4-day promotion of 360 Panorama where we cut the price from $0.99 to Free. The limited time offer was also promoted by Apple’s App Store Twitter (@AppStore) and Facebook accounts, and got picked up around the web.
Prior to the promotion, all we had heard about free app promos was the rule of thumb that you should expect “5 to 10x” the downloads. We didn’t really know what to expect in regards to user engagement or App Store rankings. So, we decided it would be fun to collect the stats on what happened and see: What happens when a best selling iphone app goes free?
Announcing public profiles for 360 Panorama
Simply click the photographer’s name in the upper right corner of the panorama you are viewing.
You’ll be taken to their public profile to see all their public panoramas!
Want to share your public profile with other 360 Panorama users? Post your public profile url to the comments and we’ll feature your profile from our @360Panorama Twitter account!
New 360 Panorama WordPress Plugin to embed your panoramas
Thanks to 360 Panorama user Mike Richwalsky, sharing 360 Panoramas on your WordPress blog just got easier.
We met Mike last week when he posted this Tweet:
We’ve offered an embed code for panoramas through your 360 Panorama account since May. Many users have taken advantage of this feature to share panoramas on their websites and blogs, including WordPress sites. However, for those users not comfortable using the WordPresses HTML editor, embedding the panorama could be a bit daunting.
With Mike’s WordPress plugin, 360 Panorama Embed, it’s now easier than ever.
With the 360 Panorama Embed plugin installed on your WordPress site, you place your panorama by inserting a shortcode in either the visual or html editor.
Simply insert the shortcode: [panoembed pano=”XXXXXX”] with your panorama ID, and the panorama will display in the immersive viewer in your post.
To embed an incredible panorama Jeff took yesterday into this blog post, we viewed the panorama to find the ID:
Included the ID in the shortcode:
And Voila!:
So what prompted Mike to make this great plugin? As Director of Marketing Services at John Carroll University in Cleveland, he recently converted over 100 sites at the university to WordPress. When he found 360 Panorama during last week’s free promotion, he decided to give it a try, and thought it was a great tool. Looking to create his first WordPress plugin, he thought 360Panorama would be a great fit… and the rest is history.
Be sure to check out Mike’s blog HighEdWebTech and give him a follow on Twitter @mrichwalsky.
Thanks Mike!
And in case you don’t remember, it’s not the first time a 360 Panorama User has created something cool for the 360 Panorama community. We could get used to this.
Announcing our first major investment
Today we’re announcing that we just raised 7M in Series A led by Foundry Group, representing the first major investment in Occipital.
Over the last year, what we’ve launched publicly is 360 Panorama – a popular app which lets you capture panoramas in seconds and share them as interactive 360 views. But what you might not know is that 360 Panorama is just the tip of the iceberg.
Your smartphone’s computational reach into its surroundings ends at its touchscreen surface. To your device, the real world isn’t a canvas of interactivity. Instead, it’s little more than a grid of pixels that might as well be random. We’re changing that. We’re using computer vision to make real world environments computationally interactive and fun, thereby extending the computational reach of your device into the visual space around you.
This concept is bigger than Occipital can handle alone, so we’re launching a platform that other developers can leverage. We’ll take care of the computer vision, allowing developers to focus on creating new experiences.
We’re also announcing new additions to our board of directors – Jason Mendelson and Brad Feld of Foundry Group, Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures and Gary Bradski of Willow Garage.
We’ve known Jason and Brad since 2008 when we joined TechStars. We’ve experienced first-hand their open and engaged approach to helping entrepreneurs. Jason, Brad, and the whole Foundry team, are awesome, and as part of their HCI theme, they share our belief that computer vision will fundamentally change the way we interact with our surroundings.
Dr. Manu Kumar is a successful entrepreneur, founder of K9 Ventures, and has a PhD from Stanford in eye-tracking HCI. We can’t overstate how helpful he has been since we met him three years ago. It’s about time we figured out how to work together officially.
Dr. Gary Bradski is the creator of OpenCV – a computer vision library used by thousands of computer vision researchers and engineers around the world. These days he’s Senior Scientist at Willow Garage where he works on advancing the state of robot vision. Gary agrees that we’re on the cusp of something huge in mobile computer vision and he significantly expands the technical gravity of our board of directors.
Welcome, everyone, to the Occipital team.
It’s going to be a wild ride – and where we’re going, we don’t need roads.
Your panoramas: now more beautiful with GPU enhancement
Today we released a great new update to 360 Panorama with lots of exciting improvements. But that’s not all we’ve been working on. Along with the update, we’re rolling out our first big cloud-based panorama enhancement, and I wanted to take a minute to show you some before and after results. I think you’ll agree that panoramas are getting much more beautiful, and this is just the beginning.
Improvement 1: Smoother
The first improvement is in the smoothness of panoramas. Check out how the colorful blue sky is made much smoother after today’s update.
Before
After
Improvement 2: More full
We’ve filled in more areas in your flat images. Check out the top and bottom regions of this panorama of St Peter’s Basilica captured yesterday.
Before
After
Improvement 3: 2x resolution downloads
All panoramas uploaded with the Premium feature can now be downloaded in 2X resolution! Unlock more megapixels within your panoramas. Didn’t use the premium feature when you uploaded? No problem, you can convert Free uploads to Premium at any time.
How does this work?
When you tap Upload in 360 Panorama, your panorama is packaged and sent to your Occipital account as a rich collection of raw image data. What this means is that your panorama isn’t set in stone, it can improve over time as our algorithms improve (like today). Behind the scenes, we’re using massively-powerful GPU servers, having them perform billions of calculations to generate and improve your panoramas.
Best of all, this is all automatic and you don’t need to learn anything new. Just upload your panoramas and the enhancements will kick in. If you used the premium upload feature, your panoramas will be enhanced today. Free panorama enhancement is soon to follow.
Welcome Mick!
Just before Christmas in 2010, Jeff and I were discussing Occipital’s plans for the next year. We had launched 360 Panorama 3.0 in early December, and it was a major success – we got to the #3 spot in the App Store and we were getting lots of really amazing 360 views uploaded every day. We decided was that we really needed a place for people to see these 360 views and we needed someone to help us build it. We split ways to get ready for Christmas, and then an hour later I got this message from Jeff:
Some dude named Mick launched the gallery for us:
The360gallery.com
Pretty awesome
David “Mick” Thompson was one step ahead of us! He had seen this Tweet from our friend Josh Fraser:
i really hope @occipital makes a gallery of all their public panos
and decided why wait?
Of course we followed up with him immediately to discuss working together, and soon he left Santa Monica and joined us in Boulder on a contract basis.
Over the past few months we’ve been impressed with Mick’s web wizardry, and today we’re excited to announce that he has officially joined Occipital as part of our core team!
You’ll be able to see what he’s been working for the past few months really soon, but just in his spare time he:
- Got asked by O’Reilly media to write a book about CouchDB and Node.js.
- Won a free pass to Google IO by winning this contest by building a walking tour of San Francisco in a couple of hours overnight.
- Found time to model for Mick’s Shirts.
As for his dedication, we’ve got panoramic proof:
We’re proud to have Mick Thompson on the Occipital team, and can’t wait to show you the awesome work he’s been doing!
See you at VTM iPhone Dev Conference!
Next month a couple of us are headed to the VTM iPhone Developers Conference in Seattle! (April 9-10) It should be a great conference covering the latest trends, and with Erica Sadun as the technical chair, the conference won’t shy away from getting technical.
I’m on the speaker roster for the second time at a VTM conference. Last fall, I spoke about CoreMotion and AR (see my slides here). This time, I’ll be talking about Computer Vision and Augmented Reality. I will cover how pervasive cameras are becoming (now on the iPad!), and how they really aren’t just about photos and video anymore. Just like how phones are less and less about phone calls, and more about powerful apps, cameras are slowly becoming less and less about snapshots and more about interacting with reality. I talked about this a little over a year ago on an O’Reilly Where 2.0 talk, so it will be fun to see how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go before we all have Iron Man vision in our smartphones and tablets.
In addition to talking about trends and hopefully inspiring some ideas for the future, I’ll share some code that is applicable when dealing with the camera which will be useful in augmented reality apps and any kind of realtime video processing. I’ll cover some important aspects of using AVFoundation and OpenGL.
If you’re not registered for the conference, there’s still time to sign up, and you can get a $150 off by using the special code SEAMAL6. (That’s like getting the earlybird discount even though you’re clearly a latebird!)
PS: We’re hiring top notch iPhone/iPad engineers. Get in touch if you’re interested, or say hello at the conference if you’re attending.
Augmented Reality Panoramas… in your browser!
If you have the latest iPhone OS (4.2+) and an iPhone 4 or iPod touch 4th gen, check out the new gyro-enabled panorama viewing we just launched!
Quick update: We always get a little annoyed when technical terms are misused, so we’re the first to admit that this new feature isn’t really Augmented Reality [also pointed out by Gizmodo, DownloadSquad], but we thought AR evoked the type of controls we’ve enabled, so we titled this post accordingly. But to be accurate, it’s true 3DOF gyroscope navigation of a simulated camera view — and it’s pretty cool! And if you want to see some actual AR work we’ve done, check this out.
Some details:
- Live now for every panorama uploaded so far.
- Requires iOS 4.2+
- Allows you to physically spin around as if you were actually at the scene of the panorama.
- Doesn’t currently auto-align with compass North, but you can use touch controls to orient with north.
Let us know what you think and how we can improve it!
