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

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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

Already known for his video “24 hours of eternity in Atacama“, Serge Brunier has recently made a 360° image of the vault of heaven, entitled “One thousand billion worlds – the sky of Earth”, with the help of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

The photographer shot the photos within a period of time of about one year, from 3 different places poor in light pollution:

- The Acatama desert, Chile, for the images that were to be shot in the Southern hemisphere (La Silla and Cerro Paranal observatories, and mount Cerro Ventarrones).
- The peaks near Castellane, France, to shoot some images near the polar star.
- Palma island, Canary, Spain, for the rest of the photos (Roque de los Muchachos observatory).

1200 photos were needed to create this giant panorama of the heaven vault: 300 frames of 4 bracketed images. The exposure of each image was 6 minutes, thus the global exposure time was about 120 hours.

Hardware

The shooting was made with a Nikon D3 and a 50mm lens. Within the 6 minutes of exposure, the Earth moves enough to create an apparent motion of the sky. This was corrected thanks to a small equatorial mount, moving in the opposite direction and making a whole circle in 24 hours precisely around the Earth’s axis of rotation.

Software

Frédéric Tapissier, a friend of Serge Brunier, was in charge of assembling the images together. He chose our software Autopano Giga to stitch the 300 frames. The result is an image of 800 million pixels, representing the entirety of the heaven vault. He then used Autopano Tour to create the interactive version of the image in Flash format, into which you can dive in and navigate in the galaxy: a totally new experience.

Learn more

Web page of the image “One thousand billion worlds”

The image was presented in an exhibition that took place in the Casino of Monte-Carlo in September:

Marc Walser created this big image of Feldkirch, a small town in Austria. This image is not only interesting because of its artistic aspect, but also because it shows a useful application of high-resolution photography. Autopano Giga 2 and KrPano were used, and the image combines gigapixel photography and embedded virtual tours.

It was a student project for Marc Walser. Here is a résumé of his work:

“Feldkirch360 was a project to obtain my academic degree. Kolor supported me, so that I could create this panoramic photo with Autopano Giga 2. I want to thank the people of Kolor because without their software it wouldn’t have been easy to create this tour in such a quality.
Feldkirch360 allows both tourists and interested citizens to dive into the city of Feldkirch (western Austria).

The virtual tourist walk into this major middle-ages city gets started with a GigaPano – a photo with a resolution of over one GigaPixel. This makes possible not only to see a large-format panorama of the city, but also to zoom into the picture and see small details of Feldkirch.

Clicking on the arrows or on the map allows visitors to enter one of the 50 viewpoints of the historic city of Feldkirch and thereby rotate the 360-degree images in all directions.

In order to increase the realistic effect of the virtual walk, ambient noise as well as specific sounds have been embedded with a special 3D-Surround technique.

Interested visitors can display info-boxes about historic buildings, and even switch the views to be part of the crowd of the Saturday morning market or discover the city at night. Other nice features, like a real-time-clock on the church , are included too.”

We thank Marc for sharing this amazing project and wish him other successful projects in the future.

Visit the website: http://www.Feldkirch360.at

IT expert Mat Broomfield made a review of Autopano Giga 2 in the latest issue of 3D World Magazine (UK). The article points out the increased speed of Autopano and the “inspired virtual tour Flash output” of Autopano Tour. You can read the entire article just below.

If you would like to buy the magazine but don’t live in the United Kingdom, you can purchase an electronic copy (issue of October 2009).

The latest issue of CT Magazine (Germany) proposes a 6-page article about panoramic photography. Version 2 of Autopano has been tested and chosen as the best image stitching program, among 11 programs. Click on the image below to see the comparison chart in full size.

If you are interested in this article and don’t live in a country where CT Magazine is sold, you can buy this article on the magazine webstore.