PICTURE THIS: Auckland Art Gallery will put hundreds of its works online as part of a Google project.
Auckland Art Gallery will open its doors to distant audiences as part of the Google Art Project.
It is one of two Australasian galleries chosen for the virtual museum tours launched by Google earlier this year.
The online project allows users to wander the likes of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Tate Britain or the Palace of Versailles.
Seventeen museums and galleries from nine countries have contributed more than a thousand artworks to the online collection.
Regional Facilities Auckland says Auckland Art Gallery will add several hundred major New Zealand artworks to the virtual gallery when it joins the project in February next year.
Google's street view technology allows users to take virtual gallery tours or artworks can be viewed individually.
Art lovers can pick and chose their favourite pieces to make an online collection to share on social networking sites.
Both Auckland Art Gallery and Google said they could not comment on the project.
Sydney's Gallery of New South Wales is set to be the second Australasian gallery involved.
source: stuff.co.nz
stuff.co.nz
Filed under news by on Dec 2nd, 2011. Comment. 
360 degrees view with dermandar
For capturing the vastness of a wide-open space, there is nothing quite as effective as a panorama photo. While many iOS apps offer panorama stitching, or even capturing and stitching, few make it as easy as Dermandar Panorama.
The beauty of the $1.99 iPhone app from Dermandar is its simple and speedy interface. Instead of asking you to follow a grid or import photos from your library, Dermandar lets you take photos from within the app and automatically stitches them together for you.
The Capture screen is simple and has only three buttons: Start lets you begin taking your panorama shot; Info brings up handy instructions and tips; and Gallery takes you to thumbnail images of Dermandar shots from around the world
When you start shooting the panorama, Dermandar asks you to pan your phone from right to left to connect the two sides of a yin-yang shaped graphic that floats over the scene. Once the shapes are connected, you wait a split second while Dermandar takes the photo.
When it is done, the yin-yang separates again and you can move further across the scene. The app tethers to points in the scene and uses your iOS device’s built-in accelerometer. When you pan a view, Dermandar tells you, for example, to move farther left and to keep your iPhone level, so the photo consistant. Because of this, it’s really hard to take a bad panorama.
Connect the Halves: The yin-yang is used as a simple visual representation of how far you need to go before the next photo is automatically taken.
The only problems I experienced with the photos (besides things out of my control, like duplicate panels from moving people) was striping from the different light exposures in the component photos and slight perspective problems. Of the three exposure options—auto, locked, and locked on start—only locked didn’t produce striping. It did, however, leave some parts of the panorama over- or underexposed—a problem that I found to be worse than the striping.
Steady Hand: When you start to tilt your device, Dermandar quickly corrects you.
Dermandar stitches photos extremely fast, displaying your panorama in seconds.
You can then choose to keep or delete your new photo.
The resulting panorama is 545 pixels high, and the width varies by how many shots you take—our nearly 360-degree panorama racked up a 1920-pixel width—not enormous when compared to the average point-and-shoot, but a little large for an iPhone photo.
Once the panorama is stitched, you can save it to your photo library; you can also easily export a shot from the app to Twitter or Facebook as a link to an interactive photo on Dermandar’s simple and easy-to-navigate website.
Photos are uploaded to the Dermandar website only if you deliberately export them and are shared under a user name that you can quickly create.
The result: This photo was taken with Dermandar on the Auto level setting.
Perhaps the coolest thing about Dermandar is the way it has collected and shared its library of images. The world map on Dermandar.comis geotagging at its best. Using Google Maps, you can browse through and comment on photos from all over the world.
In less than five minutes, I was able to find a panorama of the beach in San Diego, where I learned to surf before jumping across the world to find a panorama of a Jenga game in a living room in Herning, Denmark (complete with some deliciously affordable Slots Pilsner).
There are 360-degree views of the Kremlin in Moscow, the Opera House in Sydney, and the Grand Canyon. Dermandar’s website also offers a stitching application, so even if you didn’t have the app when you took your panoramic component shots, you can still upload them to the site’s tool, which will stitch them together in either a 360-degree or wide-angle shot.
source: macworld.com
Filed under Articles, news by on Dec 2nd, 2011. Comment.
Better Photography, a magazine on photography
BANGALORE: Better Photography, a magazine on photography, organised a competition on India’s best family photograph called the Fun Frames contest recently. The winners are yet to be announced. Winners will get the opportunity to spend a holiday package from Club Mahindra for an entire family and a fabulous Olympus PEN E-P3 camera, the candidate would also be recognised on a national level by the magazine.
The concept was to capture precious memorable moments shared with family and friends through photographs and send the entries to the Fun Frames contest.
The contest was categorised in six sections namely,? family portraits, going places, kids at play, togetherness of the joy , photo series—‘A Travelogue in Frames’ and photo series—‘A Family Photoessay.’
The contest was promoted on a large scale through television promos on CNBC TV18, CNN IBN, Awaaz, CNN IBN, IBN Lokmat, magazine advertisements in Better Photography, Overdrive, T3, Chip, AV Max, Better Interiors, Entrepreneur, Burrp, Noise Factory along with banner ads across web18 sites including In.com , moneycontrol.com , ibnlive, ibn khabar, cricketnext.com. Social media was targeted and the contest was highlighted on facebook and twitter with various continuous promotions across Club Mahindra properties through banners, standees and fliers.
The entries were collected through a dedicated website (betterphotography.in/funframes/ ) as well as physical print entries by post were accepted. The last date for receiving the entries was November 15 and the magazine received an overwhelming 6,000 entries from towns and cities all over India.
Better Photography editor, K Madhavan Pillai said, “The number of entries was incredible and to receive a response from the smallest towns to the biggest metros in India was astonishing. We plan to conduct many more opportunities through photography to explore the talent and capabilities of the people of India.”
Renowned photographer Madhur Shroff? has been bestowed with the responsibility of selecting the final six entries that would go ahead to participate in the final face off.
The face off would require the participation of the families so the finalists would get an opportunity to stay with them at Club
Mahindra in Coorg. The winner of the final face off would be announced on? December 7 at an event in the Club Mahindra property in Coorg.
Express News Service , The New Indian Express
Filed under news by on Dec 5th, 2011. Comment.
3d travel experience without…
Ever wonder what it’s like to trek to Mount Everest? Unless you’ve got a month of vacation and a big bank account, the next best answer may soon be sitting right in front of you.
Opening to the public on Saturday, Journey to Everest promises to bring Nepal to your computer screen via interactive 3-D. Along the way, the program offers a glimpse into the future of virtual tours.
The Journey was created by Singapore-based 3rd Planet Pte. Ltd. as a portal and marketing tool for the Nepal Tourism Board (NTB). “[This] enables us to showcase our country in a totally new dimension,” said NTB CEO Prachanda Man Shrestha in a statement.
Or several. After registering (free) on the 3rd Planet website, users can explore Kathmandu, navigate around Tribhuvan Airport and fly over the Himalaya to the town of Lukla. Right-click your mouse to activate “fly-through” mode and the scenes get surprisingly realistic.
In Kathmandu, for example, users can walk the streets, peer around corners, even pass through the exterior columns of the Chyasim Deval temple in Patan Durbar Square. (Careful, it takes some coordination not to walk into the walls.) Later, in a scene straight out of “Lost Horizon,” you can ride along as a prop plane works its way over the mountains to the remote town of Lukla.
For now, that’s where the journey ends with the rest of the trek to Everest expected to go live next year. Even so, 3rd Planet CEO Terence Mak believes interactive 3-D travel is ready for prime time. “Pictures and words don't do justice to a location,” he told msnbc.com. “Of all the various ways of remembering information, the human mind remembers it best through experience.”
Others in the industry appear to agree. Last year, 3D Travel of Honolulu launched 3-D portals that combine Google Earth imagery with travel-specific information for Hawaii and Las Vegas.
For Sin City, for example, users can fly along a videogame-like representation of the Strip, ducking under the Eiffel Tower at Paris Las Vegas, following along the roller coaster at New York New York and passing through the fountains at Bellagio. Sidebars let users get more information on hotels, shows and other attractions and, in select cases, make immediate bookings.
The company expects to launch a similar offering for San Francisco in January.
Whether as a marketing platform or booking tool, interactive 3-D travel is still in its infancy. However, it’s likely to become more common as the technology improves, more destinations opt in and more people incorporate tablets and other mobile devices into their travel planning.
“There’s a lot more planning going on with iPads and other tablets,” said Norm Rose of Travel Tech Consulting Inc. “The more you can give people an opportunity to experience the virtual world, the more it will encourage actual travel to those destinations.”
Or, as Mak puts it, “We live in a 3-D world and the best way to understand a destination is in 3-D.”
source: By Rob Lovitt, msnbc.com
Filed under 360 virtual tours, Articles, news by on Dec 11th, 2011. Comment.
