SIGGRAPH 2006!

Hey Folks, I recently got back from SIGGRAPH, the Association of Computing Machinery's annual blowout convention for the Special Interest Group (SIG) on Graphics. (Heh heh... SIG-GRAPH, get it?) I'm sure that kind of description makes it sound like the most fun you can have on two legs, right? Actually, it is a great convention for all kinds of people, not just graphics programmers and visual nerds (although they have plenty to do at SIGGRAPH as well). About 20,000 people attended this year, and there were over 100 companies showing their wares on the Expo floor, and lots of great advances in computer graphics were discussed and revealed.

Since I am a long-time SIGGRAPH attendee, I actually attend the technical sessions and presentations to catch up on the latest research long before it hits the consumer market, and the Expo is more of a bonus to wind down the week. (Yes, it is a week-long conference!)

A couple of things of note to PanoTools-type people:

- Stitcher 5.5 "Unlimited." Everyone's favorite high-priced competitor to our humble PanoTools, *finally* has fisheye support (coincidentally on the same day that Ipix filed for bankruptcy... hmmm) and external blending algorithms to join its list of features that closely parallel things that many PanoTools-based applications have had for some time. Things like automatic detail matching (gasp), and even fine-tuning a stitch using control points (ooh), or outputting to Spi-V or a Java applet as well as QTVR (aaah). In RealViz's defense, they *do* have the slickest and most user-friendly interface of any image stitching application, and it is reasonably fast at detection and stitching. The sad part: it is $580 dollars for these functions ($250 if you have the previous version of Stitcher).

- PixOrb HD from Peace River Studios. Tired of click-stops and manually turning your camera around its NPP? The folks in Cambridge who built one of the first camera rigs for immersive photography have a completely motorized head they'd like you to buy. Yes, it is programmable for almost as many shots around and up and down as you would like (it uses geared motors with 100 divisions in both axes), *and* it is balanced so that there is no shake or off-axis torque when switching between directions. How long does it take? Well, they didn't run the thing at the smallest divisions, but it averages about 1 second for each direction. Eric Hanson showed a 1.2 Gigapixel spherical panorama he captured with it (and stitched with PTGui on a specially built 64-bit Windows system). Yes, that image makes a 14 x 7 foot printout at 300 dpi! Loads of detail, and it took almost 250 shots around to capture. Talk about massive muti-row!

- The SIGGRAPH panoheads get-together. Michael Quan of the International Virtual Reality Photographer's Association (IVRPA) set up a dinner in Boston for those of us from around the globe that like to make panoramas. It was attended by a hearty few of us who enjoyed margaritas and mexican food (Boston tradition, of course) and I even captured a nice panorama from the middle of the table after my messy plate was taken away. See the fullscreen QTVR panorama (~2 megs) here [warning: will resize your new browser window]:

http://www.mab3d.com/QTVR/panomeet.html

I made some much humbler "megapixel" panoramas while I was there playing in the fully-stocked "Guerilla" graphics studio as well. Here is another fullscreen QTVR panorama (~1.5 megs) from that perspective:

http://www.mab3d.com/QTVR/gstudio.html

I will post links in the link section for seeing more of the products I mentioned, even though some are not really related to PanoTools at all. Thanks for reading!

-Mark