Warsaw 360° is a 6-gigapixel panorama that reveals many interesting details of the beautiful Polish Capital.

This new project, conducted by Polish photography experts Piotr Furman and Radek Piotrowski, was made possible with the help of a Kolor Panogear motorized head and Autopano Giga image-stitching software.

It is the most complex photographic project of this kind from Poland, shot from a height of 170 meters ; the panoramic head was mounted on a giant mast. More than 600 photos were taken and assembled by Kolor Autopano Giga software, on a 6-core computer with 8 GB RAM

The photos composing the panorama were shot with the help of a Kolor Panogear motorized head, supporting the camera and a 200mm lenses.

Discover Warsaw 360°.

360° World, a company based in Hungary, has just released the new world record for a panoramic photograph: Budapest 70 Billion Pixels.

We are proud to say that Autopano Giga was used to stitch the 5000 images of this record.

After 2 days of processing, Autopano Giga, which 360° World considers as being “the most complete software solution for processing high-resolution images”, generated a single .KRO file of 200 Gb, which had to be cut into 3 parts before opening it in Photoshop.

Visit Budapest and read more about the project.

Kolor released a public alpha version of next version 2.5 of Autopano Pro and Autopano Giga.

Autopano engine is composed of 3 parts:

- Kolor Autopano Synapse: the detection engine which detects keypoints, matches them, and then regroups everything into logical panoramas
- Kolor Autopano Neurone: the optimization engine for each panorama which takes results of the ’synapse’ and then calculates cameras and color correction
- Kolor Autopano Cortex: the rendering engine that creates the final panorama (rendering / blending / ghost detection / fusion, etc).

All parts benefit from enhancements. Key new features include:

- Faster image stitching on large panoramas thanks to the fully multi-threaded detection.
- Free Nodal Point: Autopano Giga allows you to stitch images even if their nodal point differed. This is very helpful for aerial photography or if you make virtual tours and want to shoot the nadir freehand.
- New color correction system, simpler to understand.
- A manual editor of control points.
- A completely rewritten rendering engine.
- Many new options in the interface and preferences.

You can test this alpha version if you would like to have a preview of what will be version 2.5. The installation of this alpha version does not remove your previous install of Autopano, so you can still use your current Autopano version if you have trouble using the alpha.

Download Autopano Pro / Autopano Giga 2.5 alpha
Learn more about what’s new
Watch the presentation videos:
* Rendering Engine : http://ftp.autopano.net/releases/videos … engine.mp4
* Free Nodal Point : http://ftp.autopano.net/releases/videos … _point.mp4
* Manual Control Point : http://ftp.autopano.net/releases/videos … _point.mp4
* General Settings : http://ftp.autopano.net/releases/videos … etting.mp4

Kolor is working with nVidia to improve its graphics card support on the Autopano software.

Autopano even supports netbook graphics cards such as nVidia Ion cards. This video shows that the panorama editor of Autopano Pro performs its calculations based on the graphics card power, exploiting all the possibilities of graphic acceleration even on a netbook.

This demonstration was done by Marc Muench, a professional photographer, on top of the Santa Ynez mountains in Santa Barbara, California.

www.paris-26-gigapixels.com

Here is a foretaste of the Paris 26 Gigapixels image! Feel free to spread the info

A HD version is also available on Youtube.

To access the big version of the preview, click on the image.

We are proud to reveal a preview image of the Paris 26 Gigapixels project. On this preview, you can see that nearly all famous monuments of Paris are present, from the Eiffel tower to the Panthéon. The thumbnails show details of the Eiffel tower, the Grand Palais and Notre Dame de Paris church.

The stitching of the 2346 individual photos (17 rows of 138 photos) was made in November using Autopano Giga and resulted in a giant image of 26.7 gigapixels: this is about 27 billion pixels! We first decided to keep the original name of the project, which was “Paris 20 Gigapixels”, but it made confusion with regard to the actual resolution of the image. This is why we now talk about the Paris 26 Gigapixels project.

So, what’s next? We are currently creating the web interface to display this giant panorama, with nice features to make the image pleasant to visit. We expect the site to be ready in a few weeks. More info to come in a few days about Paris 26 Gigapixels…

Follow Paris 26 Gigapixels on the project blog

Become a fan of Paris 26 Gigapixels on Facebook and share the info with your friends

Here are some images of the Panobook 2010 printing. It is now finished and the shipping will begin on Monday for all those who have pre-ordered the book.
If you didn’t order it yet, you can buy the Panobook 2010 on our website. 35 euros including tax, with free shipping worldwide.

Kolor has released a new public beta of next version of Autopano Tour. Autopano Tour enables you to create 360° virtual tours in Flash format.

First version already introduced some great features:

- an intuitive user interface to create virtual tours without programming skills
- several types of hotspots: polygons, points
- lens flares
- auto-rotation
- inclusion of still images, logos and Flash objects
- inclusion of HTML pages
- transition effect

Autopano Tour 1.1 will introduce numerous new features, among which:

- adding of a map
- new transition effects
- inclusion of videos projected in 3D
- inclusion of sounds with 3D localization
- new type of hotspot: distorted rectangle
- customizable graphical templates

Autopano Tour 1.1 public beta 5 was released and you can now try it. Download links are just below:

Autopano Tour 1.1 beta 5 Windows 32 bits

Autopano Tour 1.1 beta 5 Windows 64 bits

Autopano Tour 1.1 beta 5 Mac OS X Leopard & Snow Leopard

Warning: like all beta versions of any piece of software, some bugs can remain in this program. Please use it only for testing purposes.

Here are some of the panoramas selected for the Panobook 2010.

Thank you to all participants. The Panobook 2010 is already a success, with 638 participants and 1392 images received! The overall quality was high but the jury, composed of 3 famous panoramic photographers, managed to choose the 151 images that will be included in the book.

What’s next ?

The layout designer is currently finishing his work. The verification period will last about a week. Then, the book will be sent to the printer. We expect to receive the copies on mid-November. Stay tuned!

Congratulations to all selected contributors:

Robert Abbett, Franck Agoua, Kenji Akiyoshi, Thomas Althaus, Christopher Arndt, Patrick Azay, Gordon Bain, Daniel Bejannin, Pascal Bénard, Lionel Bergeret, Philippe Besacier, Cyril Blazy, Christian Bludau, Jean-Laurent Bortolaso, Peter Braatz, Guillaume Cannat, Stefanie Carle, Richard Carlson, Gérard Ceccaldi, Marc Chauviere, Pierre Chenebault, Ayres Christ, Danai Chutinaton, Jason Cisneros, Ben Clegg, Ron Cooper, Sam & Ben Cooper, Pierre-A. d’Oilliamson, Rick Daley, Marc Davis, Jef De Becker, Jorge De La Torriente, Dmitry Degtyar, Jean-Louis Desouche, Olivier Devineau, Michael Doty, Philippe Durand, Yves Duval, Maciek Dworak, Ludwig Franz, Hank Gans, Patrick Gauthey, Pascal Gérard, Murat Germen, Jason Gotlib, Fernand Grasges, Jean Guimond, Alexandre Guinefort, Matthias Gutbier, Peter Gutsche, Eric Hagemann, Kostas Harvatis, Jean-Louis Heitz, Jean Heydon, Con Hionis, Robert Hoischen, Pierre Jayet, Stan Jirman, Joël Juge, Hady Khandani, Christian Kiely, James Knight-Smith, Georg Kohr, Tapio Kostet, Jean-Jacques Lacoudras, Stefan Lago, Roderick Laird, Matt Lambert, Bruno Langlois, Christophe Larquié, Scott Lerman, Andy Lerner, Philippe Lesage, Jook Leung, Roland Lhoest, Michael Lindsay, Laszlo Lugo Lugosi, Steven Macciolli, François Martin (a.k.a. BrÖk), Severine Mary, Karl Meier, Vasilis Mentogiannis, Jean-Marc Miller, Christophe Moratal, Geoffrey Morelle, Grégory Moulard (a.k.a. muscapix), David Murray, Robert Near, Mike O’Brien, Serhat Özşen, Gregor Pchalek, Maxime Peregrini, Jim Pire, Oliver Plick, Hans-Dieter Poppe, Thierry Poutrain, Alexandre Quillet, Steve Reed, Richard Reynolds, Alberto Rot Albarca, Thomas Roth, Jean-Pierre Rouja, Pascal Saulay, Jean-Marie Schmisser, Thorsten Schumm, David Seguin, Peter Seidler, Petr Semi, Hermann Sigurdsson, Hannah Sinclair, Randy Smith, Allan Stam, Alan Stanley, Mike Steffl, Takashi Sugiura, Andrew Sullivan, Renato Tarabella, Claire Thibeau, Martin Tinak, George Turner, Christoph Vogt, Matthias Wassermann, Olive White