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Those wacky Boinx guys release You Gotta See This! iPhone 4 app

by Steven Sande Jul 23rd 2010 at 3:00PM


Over the past few days Boinx, the German developers of Boinx TV and other exciting products, have been teasing everyone with word of a new iPhone 4 app. Well, in a highly-publicized live event this morning (evening in Deutschland), the company announced a new app, You Gotta See This! (US$1.99). It's the first iPhone app for the company, so they introduced it to the world with a lot of fanfare.

The app requires an iPhone 4. Why? Because it uses the internal gyroscope of the device to automatically take photos while you're moving the camera around you. It then assembles the photos into one of six collage themes in near real-time. You don't need to worry about aligning edges of photos; the app knows the orientation of the iPhone 4 during the moment when each photo is being captured, so it takes care of the alignment for you.

Boinx developers came up with the idea of You Gotta See This! after WWDC 2010, where they realized that regular panorama apps weren't interesting enough to really show someone else what you were looking at. I downloaded the app during the announcement and put it to use immediately taking the photo at the top of the post. Of course, it's just my overgrown back yard, but it's pretty cool for a first try.

This type of photography is called "panography," and the Boinx team found artistic inspiration in the work of David Hockney, an artist who worked with photocollages. Hockney is also known for his portraits painted with Brushes on iPhone and iPad.

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Over the past few days Boinx, the German developers of Boinx TV and other exciting products, have been teasing everyone with word of a...
 

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ehusar

Here are some examples I shot today with the app. Lots of fun!

http://tinyurl.com/33f6gsb

July 26 2010 at 8:40 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mr. O

Anyone know how to get this effect from a 3GS? I love Hockey's collages that look like this and would love to find a way to pull them off without a gyroscope.

July 26 2010 at 2:52 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to mr. O's comment
ehusar

Shoot a bunch of photos and then create the image in photoshop. People were creating panography images this way for years.

July 26 2010 at 8:37 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
sepirioth

So many keep coming so close but as far as results to me Pano is still the best app for quality panoramic pics.

July 25 2010 at 9:40 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to sepirioth's comment
ehusar

AutoStitch beats Pano. I own both of them. You are limited to 6800 pixel width with Pano. I have shot some over 8000 pixels wide with AutoStitch. Also, I don't think Pano and do multiple rows?

July 26 2010 at 12:33 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
sepirioth

hmm, haven't tried autostitch, going to give it a shot.
Pano doesn't do rows, your right, i just use it in portrait or landscape depending on what i want it to do. Thanks for the recommendation.

July 26 2010 at 12:35 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
milkmage

@Steven - approximately how many degrees did you "sweep" to take that pic, from what distance, and how long did it take you to complete the sweep of the arc. I haven't spent a lot of time with this app yet, but what I've done so far doesn't even come close to what you provided..

July 25 2010 at 11:04 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
RickMacMerc

Okay. This is cool. I love me some panoramas and have been tempted at times to get a Widelux film camera after seeing Jeff "The Dude" Bridges' photos from the sets of his films.

The idea of real time and not having to worry about lining up the pics is incredible.

The iPhone 4 isn't available here in Canada yet, but once I get one, this will be one of the first apps I'm going to want to try out.

July 24 2010 at 1:33 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
othernet

Look for VideoPano - there's no need for gyro, no need for iPhone 4. Seamless tiling, and does the Sony Cybershot trick.

July 23 2010 at 11:36 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to othernet's comment
ehusar

The quality on the VideoPano is dismal at best. I stopped using it. It just can't compare to apps like AutoStitch that does individual image.

July 26 2010 at 12:24 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
KiwiBri

sony panoramas are still far nicer

July 23 2010 at 8:47 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
david

I followed these guys on Twitter for the last couple weeks as they developed this... and was really disappointed today. I was expecting a much cooler app, along the lines of BoinxTV.

July 23 2010 at 6:30 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
DrDiesel

I just wish it would save and email a full-size version and as a true attachment instead of in-line. The file it emails is not that great of quality. I know the image would be huge and the processing would take a lot more but for higher quality output I'd gladly wait a bit longer for a better result to be displayed.

The output file isn't even close to the size of an original single photo taken with the iPhone 4.

B+ at best right now, let's hope for a quality upgrade soon.

July 23 2010 at 4:39 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris K

With the join lines I'm not interested in this app at all. If it were a usable pano application, however, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

It's too bad that with all the different styles they allow, that one of them is not a traditional stitched pano. I wonder, is the application capable of joining panos as smoothly as traditional pano software like Photomatix?

July 23 2010 at 3:30 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Chris K's comment
Twist

I agree 100%. Be nice if this would keep the unjoined images around and offer some sort of intergration with a desktop app that can help smooth out the joints. Heck just being able to save a PSD copy of the joined photo would make it easy to touch up.

July 23 2010 at 4:40 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris K

Yeah, it would be great if it would save each "source" image it used to create the pano, and then saved the stitched file as an additional photo.

That is, if the stitching is truly worth anything. What they've shown is a lot simpler than actual stitching, especially considering the iPhone's camera doesn't appear to have a way to lock exposure (or is that exposed via an API?). The iPhone's camera doesn't exactly have dynamic range to spare for handling bright-to-dark transitions.

July 23 2010 at 4:44 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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