Photosynth on the iPhone

Microsoft Research are doing some pretty sexy things with visualization at the moment.  I've greatly enjoyed their Image Composite Editor (ICE, now at version 1.4.4) and already extolled the virtues of Photosynth for creating panoramic images from sequences of game rendered stills.  Trawling through the iOS App Store on my iPhone I was intrigued to discover an iOS version of Photosynth.  This neat little App turns my iPhone into a significantly useful handheld panorama creator, limited only by the relatively low resolution of the iPhone's camera (well on my ageing 3GS anyway). The end results can be uploaded to Photosynth.net for sharing.   I think the combination of iOS and Photosynth make a very capable device for capturing landscape and building panoramas.  Here, by way of example a bit of playing at Whitby Abbey.  I really like the ability to grab panoramas at will, in any circumstance that I can lay my hands on my iPhone, I can see lots of uses for this new toy - now, how can I lay my hands on a new generation iPad...

Laxton CryEngine Photosynth

More playing with photosynth, this time a panorama based on screen grabs from our CryEngine model. I like this, and the simplicity of creation is most impressive.

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Microsoft ICE: Panoramas Revisited

Perhaps a slow starter, but while preparing some tutorial material for our current crop of Landscape Archaeology, GIS and Virtual Environments students I came across the rather wonderful, and free, Image Composition Editor from Microsoft Research.

Not only did ICE cope quickly and easily with my clumsy trial panorama data generated from the sadly defunct CityScape,  it offered the option of output to Photosynth. Just a click and a fully working photosynth panorama, generated from my screen grabs.

Most Impressed.

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Spherical Projection

An office move has uncovered our old Elumens Vision Station, which sat running no more than the Elumens demonstration movies and a copy of EventScope for most of its life as no-one ever really got to grips with its peculiarities. A quick investigation revealed Elumens' TrueFrame software still installed.  The challenge was obvious, can CryENGINE be persuaded to generate spherically projected images for the VisionStation?  In the absence of SPI-API (Elumens are now long-defunct) which offered live conversion of Open-GL output I resorted to generating static images (four per spherical image) from a custom camera in Sandbox and stitching these together in TrueFrame. It works (as you can see) although the sky is a little flaky (possibly a misaligned camera; something to investigate).  However, the prospect of trying to produce animated output from CryENGINE, with limited Sandbox camera control and no native animated output, fills me with dread; something for a very rainy day...

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Strange Visions

More strange visions, this time panoramas of Stonehenge assembled in CityScape (top) and CryENGINE (below).  These strange mournful visions of the stones are quite beguiling.

For comparison, here below, a real photographic panorama of the stones, courtesy of the BBC.

BBC Stonehenge Panorama

I'm quite taken with the idea of using game engines to create artistic renderings of landscape, extending into the impressionistic, even the surreal.  Why should we be chained to photorealism by the intense graphical renderings of modern games. More experimentation, less realism...

Playing with Perception: Panoramas in CryEngine

Photographers have experimented with panoramic cameras since the Daguerreotype. Panoramas provide a fresh perspective on landscape that is both disconcerting (places and structures appear to assume different and unfamiliar relationships to each other in a panorama) and yet familiarly complete (the whole landscape is there as we might see it when we change our view by turning on the spot).  Static panoramic photographs are also strangely beautiful, and often form striking artistic impressions of land and cityscapes.

Moving panoramas have become fashionable on the web (or perhaps have come and gone in fashion) as digital photography and software such as Apple's Quicktime VR supported their creation and display.  Google Streetview is the ultimate example of this, and assumes a strange beauty when deconstructed to it constituent images.

Games-based visualisations are at first glance locked to the fixed, first-person viewpoint of the avatar, a naturalistic, view, but limited in its artistic pretensions...

Following on from playing with the camera in CryEngine to simulate the effects of changing lenses on a 35mm camera, it struck me that combining a series of static "photographs" of the landscape using appropriate software (I used the free, and rather wonderful Autostitch) would enable the creation of static panoramic images.  So here are two, of Laxton Castle.  These are 360 degree panoramas each created from approximately 30 "photographs" of the landscape from a fixed location, but each with a different view.  The results are quite pleasing and provide a different perspective on landscape, escaping from the avatar, as it were.