Click flat images to be taken to the 360 view!

Boat run ashore in Maharashtra, India

From Aneesh Bhasin

Turquoise lake in Alberta, Canada

From Tom Pace

Mountaintop in Lucerne, Switzerland

From Scott Larson

Field in Franklin, Wisconsin

From Bob Solem

Antarctica

From Craige Mazur

Red Sands in Jordan

From Elies Campo

Hong Kong at night

From Saranya Siripuekpong

Guagxi, China

From Ever G

Cusca, Peru

From Vikas Reddy

Beach at Kaui, Hawaii

From David

Click flat images to be taken to the 360 view!

Tokyo, Japan

From Manabu

Seattle, Washington USA

From Cliff

Disney World in Orlando, Florida USA

From Marc

Islington, United Kingdom

From James

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

From Barry

Canterbury, New Zealand

From nzbullet

Victoria, Australia

From shawnt 

Guatemala

From genteechristian 

Surat, Thailand

From Robin 

Happy Holidays to you and yours from the Occipital team!

One of the best ways to keep up with this ever changing ecosystem is the VTM iOS Developer Conference where you can attend talks by domain experts and meet many fellow developers.  It’s a great way to keep your skills sharp and find inspiration.

A couple of us attended the conference over the last weekend in Boston (Nov 12-13).  We enjoyed listening to an interesting variety of both technical and philosophical discussions about new features in iOS5, development strategies, and the future of mobile.

This year marked Jeff’s third time speaking at a VTM conference. He gave a talk about how to enrich the user experience of mobile apps by not limiting it to the two dimensional interface of the touchscreen.  Jeff discussed how to use the many sensors available on smartphones (e.g. gyroscope, accelerometer, compass, etc.) as complimentary inputs.

Staying true to the premise of his talk, Jeff built a sample app for the audience step-by-step with a brand new UI for “time travel”.  His app set the “time” by physically moving the device just like the arms of an analog clock.  (check out his slides here) 

Another highlight for me was the closing address, “Beyond the Gold Rush”, by Brent Simmons.  He talked about the past, present, and future of mobile.  Brent predicted that the next 5 years will be even more magical and revolutionary. 

He challenged the audience to realize this future by “solving the hard problems” because the mainstream users have now embraced mobile devices and are ready to go way beyond the fart and flashlight apps.

We accept the challenge.  Let’s get to it!

Overall the VTM conference was a great way to spend a beautiful New England weekend with comrades.

Tom Pace takes incredible panoramas.  

It’s not a stretch to say that Tom has taken some of the most amazing panoramas we’ve seen and we’ve enjoyed sharing several of his panoramas from the @360Panorama Twitter account, as well as feature a few in Noteworthy on the 360VERSE page.  Last week, at the prompt of a comment  from another 360 Panorama user, Tom crafted a blog post to share his secrets for how he creates such memorable panoramas.

Below you’ll find an excerpt of the post (view the original post here) Tom originally created for his blog The Edge of Thought.  We think you’ll enjoy it:

Best Techniques for 360 Panorama

Getting a satisfying 360-degree photo is easy, but to add that little extra bit of quality, I’ve come up with a handful of techniques that can be used to improve the finished result.

The following are the most important techniques to solve the most significant problems I found occurring in most panoramas:

1. Achieving the best camera exposure levels in the first shot
2. Moving so the images blend together properly, primarily to fix broken horizons

1. Get The Best Exposure

Determining the best exposure can be a bit of a guess, but the best way to get it is aiming the camera toward the brightest point in the 360 environment for light or average environments … obviously the sun, if you’re outside, or some light wall inside, etc.  In a darker environment, aim the camera at the darkest place so it compensates and the rest of the 360 view is easier to see, not all black.  And then, start capturing, and quickly spin around and find any places in the environment that you really like and want to see in the panorama, and if they appear way too dark or too light, then you might want to restart, and aim the camera a bit off from whatever you aimed at initially.  Then you can either assume the camera has a good initial exposure and continue to make the panorama or you can do a quick spot check again.  I usually do one single test and then do the panorama.. Although, I would have done a third on Lake Louise if I had the time (I was annoying family members who were also in the canoe, requesting them to spin the boat around! haha..)

Here are two pairs of panoramas with separate light/dark versions, Lake Louise and Grotto Mountain Pond:

Lake Louise light (the water texture is much more detailed than the dark version, but the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise is farther and harder to see here… the dark one is closer)

Grotto Mountain Pond dark (easy-to-see mountain on right, almost total black mountain on left)This technique was important for the panorama in the field with mountains in Canmore (http://360.io/HkKLEB).  I did 2 or 3 spot checks before I finished the field-with-mountains, because there is a huge amount of dynamic range.

First I aimed at the sun, so the sky was darker and all the clouds were detailed, but the mountains turned totally black.

Then tried lighter a bit, once or twice, until I liked the balance between bright sky clouds and the dark mountains. This was used by Occipital in the 360verse, and a viewer commented on it which inspired me to write this blog post.

We are proud to announce support for comments on all uploaded 360 Panoramas.

With the addition of comments, we’re releasing an additional new feature in 360 Panorama: Your activity stream. As we integrate even more functionality into the app, we know it will be important to see your latest activity in one location. That’s why we built your activity stream right into the app. With the receipt of your first notification, you will see your Occipital account icon in the top right corner. When you receive a comment or other notification, the notification bubble next to your icon will turn red. Just press your icon to view your account and activity stream.

Easily reply to comments from within the app by selecting the comment and entering your response.

Comments aren’t just an in-app feature. Friends, family, and the world (for your public panoramas) can view and share comments in the web viewer as well.

And now for even more good news: Comments and the activity stream are just the beginning. We’re hard at work building some great new features for 360 Panorama and we can’t wait to share them with you. It’s just going to keep getting better and better.

Prior to the promotion, all we had heard about free app promos was the rule of thumb that you should expect “5 to 10x” the downloads. We didn’t really know what to expect in regards to user engagement or App Store rankings. So, we decided it would be fun to collect the stats on what happened and see: What happens when a best selling iphone app goes free?

We met Mike last week when he posted this Tweet:

We’ve offered an embed code for panoramas through your 360 Panorama account  since May. Many users have taken advantage of this feature to share panoramas on their websites and blogs, including WordPress sites.  However, for those users not comfortable using the WordPresses HTML editor, embedding the panorama could be a bit daunting.

With Mike’s WordPress plugin, 360 Panorama Embed, it’s now easier than ever.

With the 360 Panorama Embed plugin installed on your WordPress site,  you place your panorama by inserting a shortcode in either the visual or html editor.

Simply insert the shortcode: [panoembed pano=”XXXXXX”] with your panorama ID, and the panorama will display in the immersive viewer in your post.

To embed an incredible panorama Jeff took yesterday into this blog post, we viewed the panorama to find the ID:

Included the ID in the shortcode:

And Voila!:

So what prompted Mike to make this great plugin?  As Director of Marketing Services at John Carroll University in Cleveland,  he recently converted over 100 sites at the university to WordPress. When he found 360 Panorama during last week’s free promotion, he decided to give it a try, and thought it was a great tool. Looking to create his first WordPress plugin, he thought 360Panorama would be a great fit… and the rest is history.

Be sure to check out Mike’s blog HighEdWebTech  and give him a follow on Twitter @mrichwalsky.

Thanks Mike!

And in case you don’t remember, it’s not the first time a 360 Panorama User has created something cool for the 360 Panorama community. We could get used to this.

Over the last year, what we’ve launched publicly is 360 Panorama – a popular app which lets you capture panoramas in seconds and share them as interactive 360 views. But what you might not know is that 360 Panorama is just the tip of the iceberg.

Your smartphone’s computational reach into its surroundings ends at its touchscreen surface. To your device, the real world isn’t a canvas of interactivity. Instead, it’s little more than a grid of pixels that might as well be random. We’re changing that. We’re using computer vision to make real world environments computationally interactive and fun, thereby extending the computational reach of your device into the visual space around you.

This concept is bigger than Occipital can handle alone, so we’re launching a platform that other developers can leverage. We’ll take care of the computer vision, allowing developers to focus on creating new experiences.

We’re also announcing new additions to our board of directors – Jason Mendelson and Brad Feld of Foundry Group, Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures and Gary Bradski of Willow Garage.

We’ve known Jason and Brad since 2008 when we joined TechStars. We’ve experienced first-hand their open and engaged approach to helping entrepreneurs. Jason, Brad, and the whole Foundry team, are awesome, and as part of their HCI theme, they share our belief that computer vision will fundamentally change the way we interact with our surroundings.

Dr. Manu Kumar is a successful entrepreneur, founder of K9 Ventures, and has a PhD from Stanford in eye-tracking HCI. We can’t overstate how helpful he has been since we met him three years ago. It’s about time we figured out how to work together officially.

Dr. Gary Bradski is the creator of OpenCV – a computer vision library used by thousands of computer vision researchers and engineers around the world. These days he’s Senior Scientist at Willow Garage where he works on advancing the state of robot vision. Gary agrees that we’re on the cusp of something huge in mobile computer vision and he significantly expands the technical gravity of our board of directors.

Welcome, everyone, to the Occipital team.

It’s going to be a wild ride – and where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

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.