Friday, November 24, 2006

We are slowly getting there


For the past two months, we have been talking to one of the maker of Autopano Pro so that we could process a very large panorama of about 609 images (each of which is 3.2 Mpixels large). The current beta release (version 1.3 RC 3) still has a memory leakage problem for very large panoramas like this one. This monster is about 2 GB large. One of the smaller panorama can be found here. Others can be found here.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Google can save your life


In a recent study, it was shown that good professionals could use Google in problems with hard to figure diagnostics. This is hardly a big discovery to the average person. On the other hand, I know first hand, of somebody who used Google and figured from the first three hits that he was having a big problem that could only be readily remedied by not staying in a high altitude environment and aiming straight for a hospital for treatment.

A C compiler for GPUs

While GPU programming might be fun on its own, the 4 to 5 times increase in speed is not likely to draw a whole slew of people into it. One of the reason may be that if you have to learn a different language, you might as well go straight for an FPGA instead. NVIDIA seems to have figured this out and they just came up with a bridge between the general community and GPU by announcing CUDA a C compiler for GPUs.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Space Vantage Points



When Nadar went up his balloon 150 years ago and took the first aerial photo, he triggered Jules Vernes into writing "Five weeks in a balloon".
The first panoramic view of a natural disaster was taken one hundred years ago after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake using a kite.

The first photo taken from space was obtained in 1946, from a V2 rocket and the first panorama in space was taken two years later.

Fifty years later, thanks to the HASP platform, we took one of the longest panoramic view from a high altitude balloon. This is mainly due to our ability to store large amount of data in common cameras (4GB).
. The interesting aspect of our approach relies on the fact that our low cost camera does not need to be equipped with either a GPS or an Inertial Navigational Unit: The use of a software like Autopano Pro enables us to patch automatically all of our pictures together and create a single large map.

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