Over 40 VR Photographers attended the meeting from countries such as Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, United Kingdom, France and United States of America. The meeting was conducted in English due to the international participants. Professional photographers as well as amateurs had a very active exchange of information on various VR shooting techniques and equipment (cameras, panoheads and such). Most of the participants had their equipment with them and therefore it was a showdown of the latest and most interesting hardware from professional manufacturers (Manfrotto, Agno's, Kaidan and 360Precision) to ingenious homemade inventions.

Day One:
Day one of the meeting was scheduled for various presentations such as HDR (High Dynamic Range). Mark Banas of Bending Light presented his favorite workflow to produce HDR panoramas with Photoshop CS 2. Following was the presentation of Ian Wood’s project “Landmarks of Britain”, which included selective Landmarks of England in HQ big format panorama prints. After that, there was an opportunity to examine the latest developments of panorama hardware made by Agno’s Tech Engineering. In conclusion to the first day of the meeting there was a refreshing story presentation by John Law about his evolution in interactive panorama making starting 15 years ago. His examples showed his struggle and progression from his first production until today’s almost automated production methods.

Day Two:
Day two of the meeting continued with further presentations. HDR was the main content, like a silver line throughout all remaining sessions. Mark Banas showed concrete examples of adaptable application possibilities of HDR panoramas for 3D computer graphics such as image-based lighting. Jacques Joffre of hdrsoft introduced the Photomatix software. This software increases the dynamic range of photographs and enables the production of HDR images. Spi-V panorama viewer is capable of displaying interactive HDR panoramas and Bernhard Vogl demonstrated various examples of “luminosity corrected” high dynamic range panoramas. Luca Vascon introduced a solution and panorama-shooting technique from towers; the campanile at San Marco place was a prime example. With such scenes it is particularly difficult to stitch the segmented images, since the nodal point is out and between the corners of the top tower platform, where the exposures have to be taken to capture the scene. In conclusion to the second day of the meeting Ian Wood demonstrated special Photoshop tips and tricks such as lossless sharpening, highlight and shadow balancing as well as panorama composing and offsets for panorama photographers.

Day Three:
On day three of the meeting Sara Caccivio presented a project to document architecture with interactive panoramas. The documentation was about a building complex in the heart of Florence, which is to be repurposed in the future. Beside the “before state” of the building complex, interactive panoramas will show the after and the in-between stages of the development as well. The day continued with a presentation from Thomas Rauscher with his “Pano2QTVR” software, a remarkable free tool software to convert panoramas to QuicktimeVR movies on a Windows-based PC. Concluding the third day of the meeting was a presentation from Stewart Milne and Mathew Rogers from 360precision introducing its new development, a very precise engineered spherical panohead for repeat and batchable panoramas each and every time. The demonstrated workflow produced a repeated result (even after complete dismount of the camera and head) of a spherical panorama in less than five minutes. An impressive conclusion, indeed!

Day Four:
The fourth day of the meeting was free at large for all participants to walk the city of Venice. During the “Lagoon City” exploration one could watch plenty of “Green Shirts” (Thanks to Marco Trezzini of VRMag, for the generous present for each participant of the meeting) Panographers shooting various scenes of the city life.

Detailed information about the presentations at the 3rd Panotools meeting in Venice, Italy

Mark Banas “Creating HDR Panoramas”
Marc Banas works for Bending Light in Chicago. He is responsible for the department of digital image retouching, 3D illustration and HDR imaging.

After explaining the difference between Low Dynamic Range (LDR) and High Dynamic Range (HDR) Banas demonstrated his favorite workflow to produce HDR. The HDR effect is generated with a series of images between 5 and 15 exposures (per segment) bracketed with
3 to 5 f-stops. For a spherical panorama, three segmented shots with a Sigma 8 mm fisheye lens are taken with one exposure and stitched with the Ptmac software. As for that the stitching for HDR panoramas has to be precise, it is recommended to stitch the median exposed series first. With Ptmac as well as with Ptgui it is possible to employ a batch-stitching mode with a script. Thus, enabling all bracketed series to be stitched exactly equally. All generated panoramas are then processed with the new HDR function in Photoshop CS 2 in order to generate a HDR file. In case a retouch editing is necessary, it ought to done in the generated HDR file, since all layers can be edited at the same time. In the second part of his presentation, Marc Banas presented various applications on HDR panoramas for 3D computer graphics (see “Uses for HDR 2D and 3D” below).

Ian James Wood “Landmarks of Britain“
Ian Wood introduced a panorama project he was commissioned for by Barclays Bank. The commission required a series of big format panorama prints of selective landmarks in Britain.
Wood has been on the roads through Great Britain for five months from April until September of 2004. He shot 115 panoramas during that time. Barclays Bank chose 45 for permanent display at their headquarters in London.

The panoramas were taken with various shooting techniques. The high-resolution panoramas comprise up to 295 exposure segments, most of them with a three-exposure bracketing method, which amounts to 95 exposures per panoramas. Some of the scenes, like the Eden Project in Cornwall, the Gateshead Millenium Footbridge in London or Stonehedge can be viewed at his website (http://ianjameswood.co.uk/landmarks-test/).

Luca Vascon “Agno’s Hardware“
Substituting Martino Agnoletto, who had to cancel on short notice, Luca Vascon presented various pano heads from Agno’s. The manufacturer has several models in his product line. Some are designed for multi row and others for fisheye lenses. The spherical pano heads were tested by many of the attendees on the spot. More information on the hardware of Agno’s on their website (http://www.agnos.com/).

John Law “From Apple’s QTVR Authoring Studio to PTMac”
John Law, educator at the school of Art & Design in Bath, England introduced some of the interactive projects he has done over the last 25 years. First works in the 80s were fluorescent light tubes, which could be interactively manipulated by the visitors. In the 90s he had moved to the digital world of design and produced his first interactive VR movies. At that time “Apple QuickTime VR Authoring Studio” was his software of choice. With this software he could design cylindrical panoramas and object movies. Unfortunately, this software has never been further developed, so he began to search for alternatives. In 2000 he found Panotools and its GUI Ptmac and started to work with it. His first stitching trial turned out terrible twisted results. Law’s panorama show and his unique way with words amused the audience with laughter, since almost all of the crowd could relate to his experience. Today, John Law is working with Ptstitcher, Ptmac and Enblend to produce panoramas with very good results.

Mark Banas “Uses for HDR 2D and 3D“
In part two of his presentation about HDR, Mark Banas demonstrated the application of HDR panoramas as light source for 3D models as well as a background image for the same scene. One example showed a 3D rendering of a car model were a HDR panorama was taken to illuminate the model. After all editing was done; a high-resolution 2D image was generated which showed the car on a beach in a dynamic driving situation. In the beginning, the model was only a line grid on the screen, then a texture was given and afterwards a HDR beach panorama was taken as source for light and background in a 3D-software environment. That way all light sources to illuminate the scene were taken from the HDR panorama and no other light sources had to be defined. The scene looked very real with natural lights and reflections in the model, virtual reality at its best. This kind of 3D rendering has its advantages over real shootings and traditional productions for product photography, where the products have to be shipped all over the world to the desired production location. With these digital renderings, models, colors and background can be relatively easily changed and modified without incurring big production costs. More examples of the work of Marc Banas can be found on his website (www.bendinglight.com).

Jacques Joffre “Photomatix“
Jacques Joffre introduced the Photomatix software. This software increases the dynamic range of single images and panoramas. It offers various functions for different needs. For a simple dynamic range increase it allows combing two images with different exposures with comfortable ease. If more than two exposures have been taken more functions become an option. The automatic function or the HDR function can be used to generate a well balanced image. HDR image may be used as lightsource for 3D software or as source for conversion to LDR with a function called tone mapping. More information about Photomatix and samples on their website (http://www.hdrsoft.com/).

Luca Vascon “Panos from Towertop“
Luca Vascon demonstrated a solution to realize panorama shootings from towers, which are especially challenging to capture and later stitch, since the nodal point for the scene is difficult to keep aligned. Towers offer a vista of the environment and it is often not possible to set up gear to turn 360 on one spot, hence the nodal point is out of center. Luca presented his workflow to shoot the campanile of San Marco place in Venice, where he was took free hand shots with a sigma 8mm fisheye lens of each of the four windows on the tower’s top platform, two shots for each window. He would lean out as far as he could and take two shots to cover the scene with the least tower in the image as possible. He then stitched each pair first before stitching the resulting four images in Ptgui. After stitching he spent considerable time in photoshop for tweaks and final editing.

Markus Matern also shared his experience with tower panos and showed a few examples. He shared a tip to stitch such projects in Ptgui or Ptmac, where you would only set control points along horizon to align the images in order to minimize parallax and later fill in editing in Photoshop. You can see one of the tower panos at his website (http://home.arcor.de/markus.matern/Panos/AlterPeter.html).

Bernhard Vogl “ADR in Spi-V“
Bernhard Vogl substituting for Aldo Hoeben, developer of the Spi-V panorama viewer, introduced the function of Spi-V. This viewer is Shockwave-based and displays spherical panoramas. It uses the memory of the graphic card to display the panorama instead software based. This makes the panning exceptionally smooth and free of jerks. The viewer also enables sprites, such as animation like smoke or water rippling or blending between two panoramas to simulate high dynamic range or else. These sprites add a lot of life to the panorama.

Bernhard Vogl showed how to embed the viewer into html and the configuration of the xml file. The presentation of a high dynamic range panorama in Spi-V is called Adaptive Dynamic Range (ADR) and is achieved with three panoramas: one showing all highlights (light.jpg), another showing the shadow details (dark.jpg), and the third one is actually an alpha mask defining the transition of highlights and shadows (map.jpg). When the panorama is paned into highlights or shadows the dynamic range is adapted to display the panorama well balanced. Sort of like an auto shutter system in a video system. The panorama presented by Bernhard Vogl can be viewed at his website
(http://bernie.x-net.at/fotos/panoramas/adr/adr.html).

Ian James Wood “Photoshop Tips & Tricks“
Ian Woods presented special Photoshop Tips and Tricks for panographers. Of special interest were functions like lossless sharpening, highlight and shadow balancing as well as offset shifting of 360 panoramas, which can be done quite comfortably with the offset filter (Filter>Others>Offset>Horizontal +/- Pixel to the right or left (with warp checked). More tips were revealed like blending a series of two images with the help of alpha masks and increase contrast without blowing out the highlights. Further, he demonstrated the new smart sharpening feature of Photoshop CS 2. With this tool, sharpening has become more targeted and convenient.

Sara Caccivio “A new approach in architectural restoring documentation. Example of the building complex ‘Le Morate’ in Florence, Italy.”
The former monastery was used as a jail for a long time and is to be repurposed as a business complex with Apartments, Offices, Shops and Cultural facilities. Sara Caccivio decided to produce QTVR movies before and after and in-between stages over this redevelopment of the building complex. Such panoramas are the perfect media to do such documentation, since nothing is left out and the whole scene is captured. On top of that, QTVRs, aside from technical drawings, are comprehensive for the novice and experts alike. The sometimes-claustrophobic atmosphere of the narrow rooms can be shown well in those spherical panoramas. So far, Sara has collected 140 GB of data of which 60 % are high-resolution panoramas with 16000 x 8000 pixel each. This work is in progress and will be produced on CD and kiosk system at the end of the project to be viewed by the visitors.

Thomas Rauscher “Pano2QTVR“
Thomas Rauscher presented his “Pano2QTVR” software. A remarkable free ware tool to convert various panoramas images formats into QTVR movies on the windows platform. This software can convert cylindrical and spherical panoramas alike. Hotspots, FOV, Pan, Tilt, Zoom parameters can be defined with ease as well as copyright tracks. Pano2QTVR is available as command line program or as a GUI, a layout that is very intuitive and makes it a breeze to use. More information on his website (www.sinnfrei.at/pano2qtvr/).

Further, Thomas presented his OpenGL Panorama Viewer called GL Pano Viewer. This hardware renderer uses the local graphic card to display the panorama with makes the presentation very smooth and free of jerks while panning. The viewer displays QTVR movies without hotspots at this time and is available free as stand-alone or plug-in for IE, Mozilla and Firefox browsers. The plug-in is only 500 KB to download, compared to 10 MB for Quicktime Player. More information’s on his website (http://sinnfrei.at/glpanoview/).

Stuart Milne “360 Precision“
Stuart Milne and Matthew Rogers presented the new development of their company 360Precision. It is a very precise engineered spherical panorama head. Designed to produce batchable and reproducable panos each and every time. Each pano head is specifically designed for a camera and lens combo to ensure its precision. The company offers an optimized script to be used with Ptmac or Ptgui with the head. The script can be used as a template with Ptgui or Ptmac as well as with the PTbatch plug-in for each software to do automated production of panoramas. Stuart Milne and Matthew Rogers shot a live demo panorama in the seminar room, stitched and displayed full screen with an overhead projector in under five minutes. Such technology makes automation a breeze and is an incredible time saver. Each head is CNC engineered and customizable with individual camera and lens kits. The 360Precision is compact, very solid, and good looking and available for 800 Euros. More information on this fine device on their website (www.360precision.com).

The 2006 Panotools Meeting will be held in Bath, England.

There is a dedicated Yahoo group for discussing plans and ideas , unlike the previous list, this one will keep the same name and continue from year to year. It's also worth keeping an eye on for images, panoramas, videos and PDFs from each year's meetings.

Related Links:

http://azurevision.co.uk/venice-05/
http://www.digitalkamera.de/Info/News/28/85.htm
http://www.berlin-im-licht.de/?p=14