After Berlin, Stuttgart, Venice and Bath, Matthias Taugwalder took it upon himself to bring the annual Panotools Meeting to Lucerne, Switzerland. The meetings have been growing steadily for the past five years, and this year's event was no different. About 50 Panotools community members attended the sessions at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts who generously provided a meeting room. Even though the meeting was free to attend – as is tradition with the Panotools Meetings – there was a complimentary light breakfast sponsored by the IVRPA, Garden Gnome Software and fieldOfView, as well as an abundance of Swiss chocolate for all brought from the chocolate factory Frey by Urs Jenni. A nice touch... Thanks also to Claudia Betschart and Rob Platt for taking care of the meeting T-shirts and the breakfast.Click here to view the group panorama of the meeting shot by Duri Campell.
It was interesting to see that even though many of the presenters had also met and talked at the International VR Photography Conference in Berkeley (CA) earlier in the year, each of them seemed to have gone out of their way to come up with even newer stuff to show. A good example of this was Helmut Dersch who had presented the basic concepts of Panotools and PTViewer in Berkeley. Attending the conference in Berkeley seems to have inspired him to pick up some of his work, because in Lucerne he showed up with an entirely new version of PTViewer for mobile phones. Joost Nieuwenhuijse followed suit by announcing an exciting new way of patching the nadir in a panorama by taking a nadir shot from slightly offset location and distorting the image to fit in the original viewpoint. The biggest announcements came from Thomas Rauscher who had been secretly working on an entirely new incarnation of his software, now named Pano2VR and running cross platform on Windows, OS X and Linux.
Panotools meetings are not just about product launches though, and the sessions for the first day were concluded by Pablo d'Angelo showing a workflow for working for handling bracketed HDR images in his open source Hugin. Bruno Postle had the final presentation of the first day of sessions, and shared his novel approach of using vectorshape masks with enblend to improve stitched results directly from the blender.
On the second day, Aldo Hoeben showed what he'd been up to since the last Panotools Meeting; from tools for sharing panoramas on Flickr to a special version of Spi-V for showing timelapse series, and some very novel ways of taking the panoramic image beyond the computer screen. Looking around in a panorama by holding a tablet PC in front of you and literally turning around had an instant 'wow-effect'. View the video
Jeffrey Martin continued with a presentation about his experiences in the field of timelapse panoramas, and finally Matthias Taugwalder concluded with a short introduction to the exhibition "Alpine panoramas - Highlights of Swiss Photography", which we would visit later that day. View the video
The third and final day of the conference was kept more as a show-and-tell day. Ian Wood showed off the features of his Lego Mindstorms-based “Frankenhead”, and later showed his workflow automation for managing and stitching large numbers of high resolution panoramas. Thomas Bredenfeld talked about some of the new features of Adobe Photoshop CS3. Other sessions included Karol Kwiatek and Mateusz Nuckowski showing DVD projects with panoramas, Bernhard Vogl talking about gigapixel images, and Luca Vascon showing a new Photoshop plugin for editing nadirs and zenith named 'Superrune'.
During the first few days of the meeting, Switzerland endured some of the heaviest rain and floods in years. Fortunately this did not make the meeting any less memorable; it even led to some unusually impressive sights of torrents of rainwater raging under Lucerne's many picturesque bridges. Even with the rainfall, there was a lot to see during the conference; Matthias had arranged for a guided tour at the Bourbaki panorama on wednesday, and at the Forum of Swiss history in Schwyz. Both excursions complemented eachother perfectly; the Bourbaki panorama is a painted, 120 meter long panorama mounted in a specially built building in true 'Baker style', where the audience stands on a platform in the center of the cylinder for an immersive view of the painted scene. In Schwyz, attendees were treated to a contemporary version of the same concept; Matthias had been working very hard to complete his part of an exhibition of the history of (panoramic) photography of the Swiss Alps. His part was an installation where his panoramic images taken from various summits were projected onto a cylindrical screen encompassing the audience.
As an optional treat for the attendees of the conference, Matthias organised a third excursion to his hometown of Zermatt with an early morning ascent of the Gornergrat. And when the Swiss say early, they mean early! The special sunrise train up to Gornergrat left Saturday morning at 5 am. With all the rain in Switzerland, the excursion was at danger of being cancelled at one point during the meeting; There was some snow on the mountain, making hiking potentially dangerous. It turned out the weather had turned in time and the expedition was met with an awesome view onto a beautiful sea of fog further down in the valley. After breakfast in the hotel at Gornergrat the excursion continued down the mountain by train and hiking down to the village of Zermatt. Sunday was left for individual trips around Zermatt.
All in all the Lucerne meeting has set new standards for the Panotools Meetings, and we can hardly wait for next year's event. It will be organised by Jeffrey Martin in Prague, Czech Republic. A final date has not yet been set, but will be likely at the beginning of August 2008. If you want to participate, please join the PanoTools Meeting Yahoo Group .
Links
Videos of all sessions and talks
360 degree panoramas of our meeting in Lucerne, shot by several attendees
Meeting Report with pictures, by Ian Wood
Meeting pictures, by Thomas Bredenfeld
Meeting panoramas, by Florian Bretzbach
PanoTools Meeting Yahoo Group
Related articles:
19th CENTURY PAINTED BOURBAKI PANORAMA
