Plug-ins for Flash Panorama Player

For years, panoramas have been presented on the web using QuickTime VR or Java-based players.
Flash Panorama Player ("FPP") has come on the scene recently and is rapidly becoming the presentation tool of choice for VR photographers. Created by Denis Chumakov, FPP is a viewer engine built on Adobe Flash Player.
FPP is a great tool. So is Flash. They're great together, and even better if you are a programmer. I am not.
At its most basic, FPP can be used to publish panos just by copying files. Here's an example of what you get when you simply copy files. It's a basic presentation, but it works well. Note the inertial damping of the motion, and the window resizing. These are just two of the features of FPP.
Fortunately, Patrick Cheatham and Zephyr Renner ARE programmers. They've created Flashpanos.com, a site dedicated to making available inexpensive FPP plugins and (this is the best part) rewriting the documentation included with FPP. They describe what they're doing this way: "Some of this is taken from existing documentation, some is reworded, some is from experience. The idea isn't to replicate existing FPP documentation, but to rework and expand it."
As an example, they've posted FPP documentation for fullscreen panoramas here. More documentation is in the works.
If you have a colleague who is a Flash programmer, turn them on to this now. Let them help you build an integrated Flash presentation for your panoramas.

Gigapans at pghtrib.com

Where's Waldo?
Kudos to PghTrib.com for taking on the Gigapan camera and putting it to work for viewsers. This isn't exactly the photojournalistic use of panorama we've been concentrating on here on The Panoramist, but it has an incredible wow and cool factor.


GigaPan is a combination of hardware and software (Developed by Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, with support from Google) that allows multiple images (often hundreds) to be shot precisely and stitched together into a large-scale multiple-row panorama. This allows for remarkable resolution in a single image, reminiscent of the photos taken by early photographers of American landscapes such as William Henry Jackson. Face to face with a contact print of one of Jackson's 18"x22" glass plates, one needs only a magnifying glass to go deep into the image. GigaPan gives us the ability to present this experience to our viewsers.

One could do the same thing with PTGui and a panoramic head, painstakingly shooting several rows of multiple images with a long lens and spending more than a few hours at the computer. GigaPan appears to streamline this process, making it accessible for us regular folks.

Do note, however, (quoting from the GigaPan FAQ): "Because a panorama is assembled from multiple pictures, sometimes you'll see strange things if something moved between the pictures." As photojournalists, we have to take this into consideration when shooting any panorama that requires multiple images.

Two weeks to the next World Wide Panorama event

The World Wide Panorama
Join hundreds of panorama photographers from around the globe for this four-times-a-year event. We make panoramas on a theme during windows of time around the solstices and equinoxes, stitch them, post them, then sit back and marvel at the variety of photographic styles, techniques and most importantly, cultures.
The 2007 winter solstice event is a "Best of the Year" theme, where photographers post their favorite panorama of the year. This year's event also features a tribute to the Wrinkle in Time, a pioneering panorama collaboration on the 1997 Winter Solstice.
This is a great opportunity to get great ideas, and to learn from experienced photographers. There are a lot of newbies that come out from behind the curtain for the first time in the WWP.
The geniuses that make the WWP run have made the uploading process easy, and also make it easy to learn how to use Google Maps and Google Earth to further enhance the sense of place a panorama creates.
There's a bonus - posting on the WWP will boost your rating in Google's search engines.
Need more info? Have questions? Join the WWP Yahoo group, and check out the WWP event page.

VR Journalism at work in the Phillippines

Fung Yu of the city of Makti shot VR panos of the scene of the lobby of the five-star Peninsula Manila hotel where an attempted coup took place last week. You may have seen the stills from this scene, which were interesting enough but didn't really have enough information to get a sense of the scene.
Check out these panos of the scene to get a real feel of what was happening: http://www.inquirer.net/specialreports/makatistandoff/vr.php
This item was originally posted on the PanoToolsNG Yahoo group.

VRMag relaunch issue online

VRMag issue 28
Marco Trezzini and the crew at VR Way Communications, a Switzerland-based company have published a new issue of VRMag, which is chock-full of panoramas, information and ideas, both commercial and journalistic.
I especially like the navigation options - QTVR fullscreen, Flash leaflet (this is new and VERY cool) and html index.
For those of us working for MSM websites, thinking about navigation is crucial. We can use panoramic images and technology to introduce our viewsers to complex, multi-threaded, non-linear stories.
This of course points out that we need talented, multi-skilled web programmers to help us present panoramas, just as we need strong designers in our print products.

Educating our viewsers

While I've been learning about making and presenting panoramas, I've also observed how our viewsers interact with them. It's been painful to watch first-time panorama viewers struggle with clicking and dragging to navigate, let alone using control and shift keys to zoom. They often give up and leave the page. Ouch.

I include some text on my pages ("Navigating VR panoramas: Click and drag to move around. Shift-click to zoom in, control-click to zoom out."), but there's better ways to get the point across. There's a current thread on the PanotoolsNG Yahoo group about helping readers better understand how to interact with our panoramas.

Eric Leeman at erikleeman.com has a nice Viewing Instructions page for his viewsers. It's tightly written, and blurring the background image to make the instruction text clearer is a great touch.



Matthew Rogers at 360precision (makers of the Ferrari of pano heads) posted to the list a link for a reader tutorial he developed some years ago. This one is a little more text-based, and may not be as easy to first use as Leeman's example.



I think it's important to remember that the interactive panorama is new to many of our users. Let's help them have a good experience. These examples are good starting points.

PTGui 7.4 beta available for download

Joost (rhymes with toast) Nieuwenhuijse has released a public beta of his outstanding cross-platform panorama stitching program PTGui. This is a good a time as any for you, the aspiring panorama photographer to explore this fantastic program.
Joost is constantly adding features and making the program easier to use. He also is very accessible, fielding questions on a daily basis on the PTGui Google group.
The current version, PTGui 7.3 is available for a free 30-day trial. The online support for the program is excellent (and required reading) for new users. Also, check out a home-baked tutorial in the Flying Short Course handouts post of last Friday.
I need to be clear - stitching panoramas is technically challenging! Be patient, read the instructions, experiment and ask questions! The panoramic community is diverse and more than willing to help newcomers who are willing to try. I will post a list of online resources later this week.