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.

You’ve been there.  We all have.  We’ve all tried to make the round peg fit into the square hole.  Only this time I’m not referring to it figuratively.  I mean we’ve all literally tried to make the round peg fit.  It didn’t fit, so we tried to jam it.  Occasionally it actually works out:  “Who needs the square peg anyway?  Square pegs are a total ripoff.”  But sometimes, you give up and shell out for the square peg.  And it’s incredible how well it gets the job done.  You never seem to fully appreciate the power of having the right tool until you’ve been in one of these situations.  You also never seem to learn your lesson, “Hmm… I wonder if this square thing can do an octagonal hole…”

You’re probably wondering, what does this have to do with anything?

I’m actually writing about a new tool that was recently built by Nicolas Pinto and several other artificial vision researchers at MIT.  The goal: learn to replicate the human vision system.  One of the big challenges in artificial vision research is testing your hypotheses efficiently.  Since we’re trying to replicate the human vision system, we can look to biological neuroscience for qualitative hints on how our artificial systems should work.  But there are still so many unknowns that, even when we’ve nailed down an algorithm, we end up with a wide swath of magical parameters to fill in.  Artificial vision is so computationally complex, that running even a small-scale test with one parameter setting could be time-consuming on a normal CPU.  If the test “fails,” should we blame the parameter setting, the scale, or the whole approach?

Nicolas and the team recently assembled a computer with sixteen graphics processors.  The idea is that this new tool can run tests so much faster (kinda like Devver!), that they can afford to toggle more parameters and run at a larger scale.  I’ve personally been frustrated with the inability to run a lot of tests, so I envy this new square peg, and intend to follow what they manage to learn with it.

In case you’re wondering what this thing looks like:

(Thanks Nicolas for permission to republish the photo.)