On this page I have a cheap way you can reduce parallax using a tennis ball and a string. This introduced " parallax error" which can ruin the stitching and affect the quality of your final photosphere.īecause of how parallax works, the effect is worst with close objects - so if you're taking a photosphere of far away scenery it might be fine, but if there is any tree branch, or chair, or even the ground, which comes too close - you will probably get a funky photosphere.Ī tripod can help, but it's not very portable, and unless you pay top dollar for one that can rotate around an arbitrary axis, your lens will not stay centered when you tilt, and the tripod is a pain to carry around. Unfortunately, as you're spinning in a circle, and pointing your camera up or down, it gets very difficult to keep your camera lens at a fixed point. Using Android's "photosphere" (part of the new Google Camera) you turn your smartphone to take a photos in every direction, and then it stitches them together into a 360 degree panorama or " photosphere" which you can then interact with and/or upload to Google maps. Hopefully future updates of the app can do both improve the stitching quality of the final image and reduce the need for camera re-alignment during the capturing process.Inserting an Android (camera phone) into the "poor man's tennis ball photo-sphere helper". ![]() Microsoft's Image Composite Editor, the Photosynth desktop app, is capable of generating good quality results from images that have been taken with DSLRs on panorama head, but it seems that at this point the mobile app isn't up to the same standards. The stitching quality of panoramic images can usually be improved by mounting the camera on a tripod, ideally with a panoramic head but this being an app for mobile devices we used both smartphones handheld, as the vast majority of users would do. You mostly still get a good idea of the scenery the image was captured in though. Photosynth does well in adjusting the exposure and white balance across the entire image but it's the stitching that really ruins the fun. Using a phone with a built-in gyroscope really doesn't make too much difference. ![]() Image resultsīelow I have posted a few results of my test session with the app and, as you can see, they are pretty disappointing. Overall the capture process is straightforward and intuitive but the frequent need to re-align the framing makes it a little painful to use and slower than the Android Photosphere equivalent. If you want to use this second option, it has to be uploaded to the Photosynth website first. It can be shared either as a 2D panoramic image or an interactive panorama. After rendering is complete the end result can be shared on and/or the usual social networks. On the Samsung Ativ Odyssey this takes approximately 30 seconds but on more powerful devices, such as the Lumia 920, take a few seconds less. Once you think you've captured enough individual frames for your sphere, you tap the OK-button and Photosynth starts the rendering process. The 'help' section explains the different capture modes. With the lens selected, image capture is pretty-much conducted in Auto mode (though you can lock exposure and white balance for all frames in the settings menu). At the bottom of this page you'll find samples shot with both phones.Īfter the installation Photosynth appears as a 'lens' within the camera app on your device. We repeated the test with a Nokia Lumia 920 which comes with a gyroscope but the results were not much different from the Samsung's. Thanks to a comment on this story we found out that officially the app requires a phone with a gyroscope which the Samsung does not have. Update: We first installed Photosynth on Samsung's first Windows Phone 8 device, the Ativ Odyssey and the resulting panoramas showed a lot of stitching errors and alignment problems. However, it took until late February 2013 to update the Photosynth app for Windows Phone 8, making it compatible with latest generation devices such as the Nokia Lumia 920, HTC 8X or Samsung Ativ Odyssey. Microsoft's Photosynth platform for creating 360 degree panoramas was officially launched in 2008 and the Redmond-based software giant released a corresponding app for Windows Phone 7.5 'Mango' in May last year. However, Windows Phone users were quick to point out that a very similar function had been available on their devices for quite some time. ![]() When Google introduced the latest version of its Android mobile operating system - v4.2 - in November last year the Photosphere 360 degree panorama mode in the camera app was the most talked about new imaging feature. The Photosynth app allows you to capture images in a sphere around you and combines them to a 360 degree panorama.
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