Occipital's 360 Panorama Receives A Much-Needed Update
September 15, 2010
Since Occipital's RedLaser and the technology behind it have been so powerful and effective for me for so long, it has been difficult to give up on their recently released panorama creating app, 360 Panorama. The app just begs to be used during beautiful mountain hikes, but I have been burned too many times by its sometimes poor stitching and low resolution images. That's why I was excited to see it receive an update last evening, which brings all kinds of fixes and enhancements, making it worth a second look.
360 Panorama is the first "real-time panorama app" for iPhone. Instead of capturing multiple still shots and stitching them together afterwards, the app is able to build the image in real-time thanks to an advanced vision-based system that analyzes images as they are pushed through. The problem was that in version 1.0, 360 Panorama didn't exactly seem advanced, as stitching lines constantly plagued images and they were saved in a very low resolution. But thankfully, that's not the case any longer in version 2.0.
360 Panorama's quality has been increased dramatically, not only in the resolution department -- it now has twice the resolution and 4x the pixels -- but also in the stitching department. No longer should a jitter or a quick movement create nasty stitch lines in your panoramas, which means you will finally be able to share your images without embarrassment.
The app also sports a few new features, including the ability to change the background color to white or black, an option for stereoscopic panoramas (the circular ones), and the ability to share your creations via email.
This is just another step in the right direction for 360 Panorama, however. Although the app is intended to be a quick, real-time and iPhone-centric panorama creator -- you can literally create a panorama in 30 seconds -- it would be nice to see even more options, like the ability to crop images right in the app, and maybe some blending options to fix where 360 degree images meet.
360 Panorama is available in the App Store for $2.99.
Below are a few panoramas created with 360 Panorama. I have included a before and after manual cropping comparison, and another nearly full-resolution (WordPress doesn't allow us to upload images larger than 1.0MB) panorama.
360 Panorama is the first "real-time panorama app" for iPhone. Instead of capturing multiple still shots and stitching them together afterwards, the app is able to build the image in real-time thanks to an advanced vision-based system that analyzes images as they are pushed through. The problem was that in version 1.0, 360 Panorama didn't exactly seem advanced, as stitching lines constantly plagued images and they were saved in a very low resolution. But thankfully, that's not the case any longer in version 2.0.
360 Panorama's quality has been increased dramatically, not only in the resolution department -- it now has twice the resolution and 4x the pixels -- but also in the stitching department. No longer should a jitter or a quick movement create nasty stitch lines in your panoramas, which means you will finally be able to share your images without embarrassment.
The app also sports a few new features, including the ability to change the background color to white or black, an option for stereoscopic panoramas (the circular ones), and the ability to share your creations via email.
This is just another step in the right direction for 360 Panorama, however. Although the app is intended to be a quick, real-time and iPhone-centric panorama creator -- you can literally create a panorama in 30 seconds -- it would be nice to see even more options, like the ability to crop images right in the app, and maybe some blending options to fix where 360 degree images meet.
360 Panorama is available in the App Store for $2.99.
Below are a few panoramas created with 360 Panorama. I have included a before and after manual cropping comparison, and another nearly full-resolution (WordPress doesn't allow us to upload images larger than 1.0MB) panorama.
