John Dyer

Last week, I visited Cancun with my in-laws and had a chance to see the ruins at Chichen Itza. I took a series of photos and made them into a panorama using Papervision3D (as done here by BlitzAgency for NBC's The Office and here by a company selling a product called Flash Panoramas). I made a little script that can handle both spherical and cubic images to see how both would look. Here's some previews of the two versions (The lines are there to show how the panorama is being constructed):

Spherical

Cubic

A cubsic panorama is composed of six images (top, bottom, left, right, front, back) while a spherical panorama is made using a single image which is stretched at the top and bottom (like a map of the world where Greenland and Antarctica are distorted). In general, it looks like the spherical version can generate the same level of detail with fewer polygons and thus more speed, but the cubic images can be a little smaller and are more easily edited.

Each of these is composed from approximately 45-50 images. I took around 15 in a circle at the horizon, 15 looking up about 45 degrees, and 15 looking down 45 degrees. Unfortunately, I didn't take enough pictures to complete the sky or the ground below, so you'll see some black spots if you "look" up or down. I used Hugin to stitch the images together, and it did a pretty good job considering I didn't have a tripod or wide angle lens to accurately take the pictures. (link: the best tutorial I have seen on image stitching)

3D Panoramas

• Pyramid: spherical | cubic
• Ball court: spherical | cubic

Original Images

• Pyramid:
  • sphere
  • front, right, back, left, top, bottom
• Ball Court
  • sphere
  • front, right, back, left, top, bottom

The view page also has a list of commands (f=fullscreen) and links to the original files.

Update: I changed the navigation to be more like QTVR where you have to click to move, and there is an arrow cursor. Also, smoothing and precision are automatically applied when you stop moving.

The Data Portability Pack that I posted about a few weeks ago has now made it into the core of BlogEngine.NET for version 1.4. Mads Kristensen added the SIOC and APML handlers, and Roman Clarkson is working on a FOAF implementation that includes adding some Profile data (first and last name, etc.) to users of a BE.NET instance.

FOAF (friend of a friend) currently doesn't have any way of (1) automatting "Add as Friend" style interactions (like Facebook or Myspace) or (2) verifying connections between people. Roman and I would like to find a secure way of implementing this functionality which would in effect create a decentralized social network. There are however, several problems to work through regarding security (public vs. private friends lists), identification (unique IDs: email or OpenID?), verification (preventing friend spam), and so on. These issues have been talked about for some time in the FOAF community, but so far there hasn't been an implementation. Here are some older (2003) and newer (2007) discussions on the subject to get caught up:

• http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/events/foaf-galway/papers/pp/semblog_personal_publishing_platform/
• http://lists.foaf-project.org/pipermail/foaf-dev/2003-June/005405.html
• http://www.knowing.net/PermaLink,guid,2b569984-7ee9-4a66-b009-156fd5f5cb33.aspx