360 Panorama does instant, awesome panoramas

Shooting panoramic photos with a mobile phone can be difficult. Often it requires doing all the work in a software app when you get back from wherever you are, as well as trying to make sure that the phone's camera does not change its white balance or exposure between shots.

Occipital, the creators of the popular RedLaser scanning app (which wassold to eBay last month) have a new iPhone app debuting on Friday called 360 Panorama, which is attempting to change that. For $2.99, users can simply move their phone from left to right to capture a photo panorama. The end result is a single, panoramic photo that requires zero post-processing.

To use the app, users just hold their iPhone and move from side to side, capturing the area around them.

(Credit: Screenshots by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Behind the scenes the app is actually using the iPhone's video camera, which means that users will need a 3GS or the newer iPhone 4 to use it. The app also takes advantage of the iPhone 4's gyroscope hardware to help judge how quickly you're rotating, so it can figure out what needs to be captured and where you've already been. As it records imagery, it stitches together an image based on your movement, which you can see and track to make any angle corrections. Some modern day point and shoot cameras like Sony's Cyber-shot DSC-W370 are able to do the same thing, though with a larger end result.

Size and distortions are ultimately the two things that limit this app from being as useful as proper photo stitching software. The images it spits out are quite small when compared with the still shots your camera takes. You can see this in the two sample photos I've embedded below (click on each to see it in full size):

A demo shot taken in downtown San Francisco. Normally this would take several shots, but 360 Panorama is able to capture it all at once.

(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

And a full 360 of an interior:

A 360 degree shot taken from inside CNET. (click to see in its original size)

(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

The larger problem is the distortion, which Occipital co-founder Vikas Reddy told me is made worse in indoor situations. His team is working on ways to make it better in a future release, but in the meantime shooting outdoors provides for a much smoother and less jaggy experience. Being in the urban jungle of downtown San Francisco, I wasn't able to fully test how well it would work on something like rolling hills or a forest, but as you can see from the shots above it does a fine job until you hit perfectly straight lines where the software is forced to make a stitch by guesswork.

These issues aside, 360 Panorama is an incredibly neat, and genuinely useful app. It may have no business taking over the job of a good crisp, and low distortion still image, but if you want to quickly capture an incredible amount of detail of the world around you, it's tough to beat.

If you want to see how it works while using it, you can see it in the company's demo video below:

iPhone users can also check out OutmanTech's Video Panorama app ($1.99) and Boinx's You Gotta See This ($1.99), both of which work with the same basic principle.

[Jdugan4]

Another useless app.

[Ganymede28211]

Boring. My son's LG NON-smartphone did this a year ago. No apps, just built in the camera as a feature.

[trewbux]

AutoStitch creates panoramic photos by stitching together individual photos from the same vantage point. In my experience this makes for much crisper and less-distorted results than what you show above, because the camera can focus and adjust each shot individually. It also outputs fairly high resolution images (although maybe not the full res of the input images).

[Josh.Lowensohn]

Yeah, stitching together stills will do that. But like I mentioned above, you have to get something that will keep the exposure and white balance the same from shot to shot. Otherwise you end up with big patches of sky, or whatever, that don't match up with the next tile. The benefit here is that you can see how it will look as you're taking it, which is quite neat.

Adding to Josh's comments - The distortions are something we can constantly improve, and we're actually still not tapping into the full resolution of even the 3GS video (let alone HD frames from the iPhone 4), so I think you will be pleasantly surprised with what we'll be able to do with realtime video as we evolve the application.

[tanker1811]

whats with the commie poster?...

[Josh.Lowensohn]

Good eyes. It's a poster of noted Communist revolutionary Felix Dzerzhinsky that's been here for years. Not sure when or how it got here, and nobody's bothered to take it down.

[bmedicky]

Dzerzhinsky was the founder of the Soviet secret police. Calling him a "revolutionary" makes him sound like some kind of humanitarian or something, when in fact he was nothing more than a butcher. It's like having up a poster of SS founder Heinrich Himmler. You wouldn't be caught dead with a Himmler poster, I think, so why give a brute of Dzerzhinsky his moment in the sun?

[Randmuser]

Actually, what I'd really like to see is an app with the same capture interface but that saves the actual individual shots to the camera roll. Then you could stitch them with a "real" stitching program (AutoPano or such), without worrying about pics not overlapping enough or having missed a part of what you'd wanted to capture.

[Josh.Lowensohn]

I haven't tried it, but I believe that's what "You Gotta See This!" does. It pulls them together in something comparable to Microsoft's PhotoSynth. It's linked @ the end of the post.

[nixermac]

Good idea but the jagged lines do not make this very promising. I have been a panorama photographer for a long time and I used the QT Panorama tools from the time you had to code your way through. I still prefer the hard way. Actually it became easy when I did a project where I had to make 300 panoramas for a tour in India. We scanned each photo and color corrected them before stitching each pano. Well, we had a work flow in place but it took us more than 3 months to accomplish it all. Then the funding died and the client did not pay me for a lot of the work. But it was satisfying.

I have tried some tools on the iPhone 3G and 3GS but they are more for amateurs. Will try the iPhone 4 as it has a better camera and then let us see how it goes.

[jlb1705]

Wow, those pictures look like butt.

Novices/amateurs like me are probably better off going with Pano. The price for the app is the same and the photos look much, much better.

[eholbrook]

This is an awful app not ready for primetime. Novelty lasts about 10 seconds.

The best two on the iPhone are still autostitch and video panorama (which now with the iphone's HD video really shines).

I would take a que from a combination of both Video Panorama and Autostitch with this 360 app and instead capture real frames and store them...THEN stitch them together.

So use the video mode like Video Panorama to do the initial realtime capture and maybe show a rough preview (maybe)..., but allow panning the camera in any angle like Autostitch does with photos.

As it currently works this 360 app just doesn't really offer anything useful or even fun or cool to look at.

Thanks for your comments. Image quality will get much better -- We've focused the last 9 months on making the visual tracking work fast and in realtime. Now that the core algorithm works, there is a long list of technology improvements on the way that will improve the quality. We had to get something out there to learn from it because doing this in realtime hasn't been done before. Now that the feedback is rushing in, improvements will come fast. Thanks again.

[eholbrook]

.... and btw, THE best photo panorama app out there is still taking them into Microsoft's photo gallery.

Produces the largest, cleanest, smartest stiches possible. Autostitch on the iphone (or the old PC version) has a tendency to curve things way too much, like you're looking at a mirrored ball, and doesn't align things too well like landscapes with a tree in the view.

[shpoffo]

I like the app Pano - it has a much better resultant stitch quality, and is the same price.

[wtscapegoat]

http://microsites.lomography.com/spinner-360/

[snowy owl2]

I would second the notion that Pano is a better choice... or any app that works from individual images. Just from the test images from 360Panorama above, I would not even try it.
Now, to use Pano or another app like it, to need to practice a bit to get the right amount of overlap & the bottoms of the images making up your pan as level as possible. To aid in this, good apps give you a grid overlay or a shaded edge (Pano) to show you the limit of the previous image. So use an app like Pano, that takes separate pictures, but don't give up after one or two test runs
I now take 180-270 degree pans without much effort and you'd be hard pressed to detect the breaks. Also I then can crop the pan -- if I've done a good job of keeping the bottom of my images somewhat on a line -- in another app, removing the black arcs both top and bottom.

[dwinks]

Seriously, $2.99 for this turd? The example pics look more like a Cubist-style painting than a panoramic picture. I think I'll continue to do my panoramas on a real camera with a tripod.

[zclayton3]

since this is only good for iThingies and not camera phones in general, shouldn't you mention that on the teaser? or are you just desperate for page hits?