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.

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.

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.