Filed under: iPhone
A new approach to iPhone panoramas
There are plenty of iPhone apps that shoot panorama photos. You take a picture. Move to the left or right, and after you have 3 or 4 images the panorama software stitches the images together.Now, Occipital is offering 360 Panorama, a different approach to getting wide, or even 360 degree images. The app is dead simple. Click on a button to start the process, then slowly turn left or right. You appear to be taking one continuous image, and as you move you can see the image filling in on a grid. You don't do any stitching, the software does it in nearly real time. You can go wide, or even shoot vertical images. Or you can do both, panning up and down, and moving left or right. The image will fill in. It's pretty cool to watch. When you tap 'save' the image goes to your camera roll.
The app does a lot of processing and therefore needs to run on an iPhone 4 or 3GS. I had good luck using the app. I did have some trouble getting the edges to line up in a complete 360, but I think that is a matter of practice. Boinx released a similar app last week called You Gotta See This!
Gallery: 360 Panorama images
The resolution of the photos does not equal the sharpness of the iPhone camera running under the Apple on-board software. It's a trade-off between speed and quality. The developers say the resolution will improve in later versions of the software. I found the resolution as-is more than adequate, but of course I'd like it to be higher. I have a few samples of images I did around the neighborhood. They are reduced in size to make them more web friendly. Check out the gallery to take a look.
Unless you can rotate very rigidly, the images will need cropping. You can always do this in iPhoto when you export your camera roll, but I think the cropping should be built in as you will almost always want to crop. I'm using Photogene, which runs right on the iPhone, and offers other enhancements besides cropping.
360 Panorama is very interesting and thought provoking software. What it does would have been unthinkable on a full size computer a few years ago. To have it on a cell phone is extraordinary. I'm looking forward to updates and improvements, but the current version is quite good and blew some people away when I demoed it.
360 Panorama is very unique and very useful. It's US $2.99 at the app store.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
jak Tiano said 7:10PM on 7-30-2010
For some reason TUAW galleries are horrible on my computer (or maybe for everyone) because of this those sample pictures look absolutely horrible, and I don't really know what to expect.
On topic: I think I might have to grab this, even though I just got autostitch panorama a few weeks ago (which is also really good). I thought I had heard about an app like this, but couldn't find one back then, and now here it is. Nice review.
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JC said 7:43PM on 7-30-2010
If those samples are the quality of photos that can be taken by this app, then a big NO! Those pictures are just plain awful.
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Adam said 8:30PM on 7-30-2010
This app is awful. I appreciate the idea immensely-- but the final product is anything but impressive. For the price and extra time of snapping a few pictures, autostitch destroys the iPhone panorama market
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David L Good said 9:43AM on 7-31-2010
From what I see in the gallery here, the application creates too much 'banding' in the final image.
I don't care for the reference to Boinx Software's "You Gotta See This!" -- that is an application that takes a series of photos and creates an artistic representation. It has nothing to do with pano-stitching. Rather, I think it would have been better to reference the OutmanTech application "Video Panorama" which looks like it does the same thing.
Anyone here use Video Panorama? The images on their page look good, but those are 'marketing' photos, so I can't really trust them.
David L Good said 10:03AM on 7-31-2010
@Adam - Sorry about the previous post getting associated with your post. I thought I was posting to the board and not under a specific comment.
Regardless, I did have a comment for you -- in reference to AutoStitch. I purchased AutoStitch after a CNET writer placed it in his Top 10 list, saying it was the best pano-stitch application out there. I wonder if he's actually tried any others, or if he's just saying it's the best because he spent money on it.
Have you tried Superama? It's free and and it has one of the best warp-matching stitching I've seen. With some of the other pano apps (especially when there are objects close to the camera) you can see 'ghosted' versions of certain objects where the two photos were stitched together, since the stitching application didn't handle the outer lens distortion properly.
I took a very close pano of my desk (lots of close-up objects) and Superama handled the lens distortion VERY well. The other stitching applications I tried did not perform lens distortion correction, so there were slight ghosting of some objects.
Erik said 8:32AM on 7-31-2010
The photo quality reminds me a lot of Google Maps Street View photos. I wonder if this is the same sort of program they use.
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Timothy said 9:40PM on 8-02-2010
Try "video panorama". I've tried a few out there, but this one is the best yet.
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Albert Martin said 12:52PM on 8-02-2010
Video Panorama from Outman Tech yields better results in my testing. The panoramas don't have weird edge blending or "banding" like I see in this app.
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Michael said 8:21AM on 8-01-2010
Based on this article I thought the app would be great but the results are very different that what TUAW is showing.
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stokes said 2:09PM on 8-01-2010
I bought this sorry POS. I've got an iPhone 4 with the gyro to help out even and it can't take a decent panorama to save it's life. I've tried bright light, dim light, moving slowly, moving fast, doubling back over old pictures etc. It's complete crap, avoid.
Sheldon
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Michael Rygaard said 12:42PM on 8-02-2010
This application is AWFUL, cant belive I spend money on it
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