The Ars Electronica Festival 2010 is announced to take place from 2.-7. Sept. 2010.
The main location of the 2010 Festival will be within the factory premises of the former "Tabakwerke Linz" - a world-renowned icon of modern industry-architecture.
Please visit the Ars Electronica Festival Homepage for more information and further announcements.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Microsoft ICE, gigapixel robots and Photosynth united
The new version 1.3.3 of Microsoft ICE has been released last month and there are a lot of interesting features. For panorama photographers most notable are the possibility to...
The new importer stays within the design philosophy of ICE. This means, most of the panorama creation steps are automatic.
The downside: if the detection fails for any reason, there is no way to set control points or adjust the position of single images. However, this isn't such a big problem as ICE's detection engine is working pretty well.
To give you a quick glance, here is the screen of the importer dialog: First, ICE will ask for the images belonging to the panorama. Then, the software will try to auto-guess the shooting order. If you are not content with the arrangment you can optimize the image arrangement yourself.
The importer seems to be optimized for Gigapans but any other robot will also work (i have used a Papywizard/Merlin combination).
After the import dialog, the rest of the panorama detection is done automagically and we will end up with a stitched image like this:
Please note that ICE flattened out all exposure inconsistencies.
This is the sample panorama published to photosynth:
For further reference and download, please visit the Microsoft Research page at
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/
For a peek on further planned features, see
http://windowslive.com/Connect/Post/c5a638dc-e84a-4f0a-81f9-c52f9a047aa3
FAQs, Discussions and Known bugs and issues are available at
http://community.research.microsoft.com/forums/112.aspx
- ...create a "structured" panorama: This is very helpful if you have captured a panorama with the help of a panorama robot. ICE will pre-align the images, so junctions that are hard to detect will already fit sufficently (e.g. sky images)
- ...upload the panorama to Photosynth: The stitched panorama will be viewable without any size contraints on the Photosynth web page.
The new importer stays within the design philosophy of ICE. This means, most of the panorama creation steps are automatic.
The downside: if the detection fails for any reason, there is no way to set control points or adjust the position of single images. However, this isn't such a big problem as ICE's detection engine is working pretty well.
To give you a quick glance, here is the screen of the importer dialog: First, ICE will ask for the images belonging to the panorama. Then, the software will try to auto-guess the shooting order. If you are not content with the arrangment you can optimize the image arrangement yourself.
After the import dialog, the rest of the panorama detection is done automagically and we will end up with a stitched image like this:
This is the sample panorama published to photosynth:
For further reference and download, please visit the Microsoft Research page at
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/
For a peek on further planned features, see
http://windowslive.com/Connect/Post/c5a638dc-e84a-4f0a-81f9-c52f9a047aa3
FAQs, Discussions and Known bugs and issues are available at
http://community.research.microsoft.com/forums/112.aspx
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Photoshynth 3D Fun!
The most interesting thing about Photosynth is the possibility to have your images mapped in 3d space. A "classic" panorama is shot from the NPP (no parallax point) so there is no depth information available.
This changes if you're capturing stereo panoramas. They contain the needed depth information, just like the human stereoscopic view with 2 eyes.
I uploaded 2 stereo panoramas from the flak tower in Vienna to Photosynth to see if it really works ... and it did:
The scene looks best in fullscreen using the DirectX viewer !
Here is a link to the default Silverlight viewer, along with the second panorama. The most impressive views are the overhead view and the point clound zoomed out:
This changes if you're capturing stereo panoramas. They contain the needed depth information, just like the human stereoscopic view with 2 eyes.
I uploaded 2 stereo panoramas from the flak tower in Vienna to Photosynth to see if it really works ... and it did:
Here is a link to the default Silverlight viewer, along with the second panorama. The most impressive views are the overhead view and the point clound zoomed out:
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Panorama stitcher - the next generation
A new generation of the well known and (in many variations) ubiquitous Panorama Tools Stitcher is available, fittingly called "PTStitcherNG" - created by the author of the original software, Prof. Helmut Dersch.
The new application uses SIMD Maths and can delegate the calculations to a CUDA-capable GPU. My personal tests with a Nvidia GTX 260 (GT200b) revealed a speed increase of up to 24 times compared to the (also very fast) PTGui 8.3.6 stitcher!
The stitcher is still in an early beta state, so don't expect it to be feature-rich. However - integration in PTGui is already working.
PTStitcherNG is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux (x86). The most current version can be downloaded here.
Please note for version 0.4b and Windows Vista/7: At the moment there is a compile problem, so the stitcher will only run in Win95/98 compabitility mode.
The new application uses SIMD Maths and can delegate the calculations to a CUDA-capable GPU. My personal tests with a Nvidia GTX 260 (GT200b) revealed a speed increase of up to 24 times compared to the (also very fast) PTGui 8.3.6 stitcher!
The stitcher is still in an early beta state, so don't expect it to be feature-rich. However - integration in PTGui is already working.
PTStitcherNG is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux (x86). The most current version can be downloaded here.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Say farewell to Vienna South Train Station
What the Viennese people always liked to do is to watch a moribund dying:
On 12.12.2009 the Vienna South Train Station was opened to the public for the last time. After that day the demolishion starts to make place for the new "Vienna Central Station". Many parts of the infrastructure were already removed as well as the famous "eyes".
Hundreds of photographers (including me) took the "last picture" of this train station which was built in its present form between 1955 and 1961 by architect Heinrich Hrdlicka. With the central building he combined the already existing stations "Vienna south" and "Vienna East", which were built in the 19th century andseverely damaged in WWII.
More images by Michael Hierner (derstandard.at).
You can also explore an overview of the area in high resolution as well as see the monthly progress of the construction work.
On 12.12.2009 the Vienna South Train Station was opened to the public for the last time. After that day the demolishion starts to make place for the new "Vienna Central Station". Many parts of the infrastructure were already removed as well as the famous "eyes".
Hundreds of photographers (including me) took the "last picture" of this train station which was built in its present form between 1955 and 1961 by architect Heinrich Hrdlicka. With the central building he combined the already existing stations "Vienna south" and "Vienna East", which were built in the 19th century and
More images by Michael Hierner (derstandard.at).
You can also explore an overview of the area in high resolution as well as see the monthly progress of the construction work.
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