It’s that time of the year again where all of us at Garden Gnome Software would like to take this opportunity to wish you and yours a wonderful holiday season.

Thank you for the wonderful year. We spent 2015 working feverishly over Pano2VR 5 and we thank you for your feedback! For all of our Object2VR users, we still love you and we promise to have an update for you very soon.

If you haven’t tried version 5 it yet, we encourage you to do so. You can try it for free and learn all that it has to offer. If you haven’t yet noticed, we have been making some tips and tutorials to introduce you to the latest version. Some are quite advanced but we do have a Getting Started video to help ease you in to the new interface.

Wishing you joy at the holidays and in the coming year,

The Garden Gnome Software Team,
Thomas, Karyn, Martin, Christoph

Today, we are releasing a new beta version of Pano2VR 5. We are now really close to the final release, but some changes and delays made a new beta necessary.

Here are the highlights:

• New simplex_v5 skin
• Alternative map providers in the skin
• Cardboard (VR) template and skin are included by default

And notable bugfixes

• Flash background sound was not playing.
• Skin: Better Scroll Into View within the Cloner
• Skin: Relative position with stacked logic blocks where child elements in the skin were not moving relative to their parents.

You can download the latest version from the Pano2VR page.

We also updated the Wordpress and Joomla plugins to work with maps in the skin.
You can download them on the Wordpress/Joomla plugin page.

We are very happy to release Pano2VR 5 which is a major update with a lot of new features. The most significant change being how fast you can get things done.

Pano2VR’s new interface is flexible and customizable. It also features an interactive, central viewer that provides precise placement of hotspots, lens flares, patches, images, videos and sounds.

We’ve added an Animation Editor that will create self-playing panoramas for auto-rotation. Or you can use the Animation Output to create a movie file that you can share on your favorite video service.

In Pano2VR 5 Pro, you can now automatically link your geotagged tour images so that most of your work is already done for you. If the tour is large, use Tags to help organize the project. Not only that, the geotagged images can also be filtered by distance in the Tour Browser.

Patches Mode will now automatically open your image editor and auto-update itself once the extracted patch is saved. This makes retouching the nadir a breeze!

Did you just get a Ricoh Theta, or one of the many new 360º handheld cameras? If so, you’ll find Leveling very helpful to straighten those crooked horizons.

The Skin Editor got a plethora of new tools that make skin building even easier. For instance, you can use the Components Toolbox for saving and reusing parts of your skin. Even easier would be to use the built-in components we provide, like thumbnail sliders and information pop-up boxes.

This is just a small sampling of all the new features. You can read more about Pano2VR 5 here. You can also find the documentation online or if you’re not online, go to the Help menu and choose, Help.

We’ve also been busy creating tutorials to help you learn about Pano2VR 5. We recommend bookmarking this Pano2VR 5 playlist. Also, our forums are very active and provide an abundance of tips, tricks and general information. So stop on by and say Hi!

Download Pano2VR 5.

It has been a while, yes, but today we are releasing Object2VR 3.1.0!

In this version we have made a lot of fixes and some fine-tunings, including the improving of the HiDPI support for HTML5.

We have added support for the following Canon cameras:
EOS5DS / EOS5DS R / EOS 760D / EOS 750D / EOS M3

The following tables are also now supported:

• TopShow3d
• Panotable GRII
• Photomechanics

You can download the new version from the Object2VR download section.

Help can be found online. Or you might want to take a look at the forum. And as always, you can contact us for more direct support.

Enjoy!

Getty Images has been publishing Year in Focus for iBooks every year since 2011. The book tells a tale of the world for the past 365 days with images and videos. For the past few years, they’ve also included 360º panoramas created with the Pano2VR iBook widget.

If you haven’t already done so we suggest heading over to the iBooks store and download the free 2015 edition, either on your iPad or iPhone or on your Mac.

You can also create your own iBook full of panoramas using our widget for iBooks. It’s a great way to show your panorama projects (especially for offline purposes). If you do decide to create one, let us know! We would enjoy reading it.

If you find yourself needing to fix your down shots or any other portion of your panorama, you will find Pano2VR’s Patches Mode a helpful feature and we’ve just made a tutorial to help you show how to add and edit patches.

Patches lets you extract a portion of the panorama that is not distorted. Just edit that extracted patch and Pano2VR will automatically update the panorama. Of course you’re not limited to just the down shot. A patch can be applied to any area of the panorama.

• Learn more.
• Watch on YouTube.

Here is a doozy of an update for you! It is our first bugfix release for Pano2VR 5.

On Windows you may get a “Connection Error” after checking for updates. In case this occurs, you will need to manually download the update. This bug has been fixed in this update.

That’s one fix, here is a sampling of the rest:

• Fixed: The address bar in Safari was not hiding when an iPhone 4 / 5 rotated to landscape mode.
• Fixed: Sound was not always playing after the initial tap on iOS.
• Fixed: If you had a Text Box in a skin and set it’s text color, and also used CSS, the text’s color would assume the color defined in the page’s CSS.
• Fixed: If you tried to hide a skin element using the Alpha parameter (setting it to 0), it would still be active within the skin.
• Fixed: Sometimes, the tiles for a Flat input image were being constantly regenerated on output.
• Fixed: The Min FoV - Pixels setting for Flat input images, was being ignored.
• Fixed: Check for updates on Windows was displaying a connection error.
• Fixed: Dutch was translation missing. (Sorry!)
• Fixed: If you had tags with similar names like hall, hallway, hall1, all three would appear in the tag filter when you would search for hall.
• Fixed: If a Logic Block is using simultaneous attributes it was not using the timer to change states.
• Added: In the Animation Editor, you can now change the order of the clips and save that order.
• Fixed: On Linux, you couldn’t change the program’s language from System Default.

You can download the latest version and read about the rest of the fixed bugs from the Pano2VR page.

Remember BRIGHT? We featured their work a few years ago for their Pano2VR projects.

Now, we are focusing on their work done with Object2VR. In their latest project, they created a unique training experience for airBaltic.

Using Object2VR, they created an object movie of an airBaltic Boeing 737. You can see how they did that with this time lapse:

They then use hotspots to load the training videos relevant to that area of the aircraft. There is a panorama embedded in the project and a few other object movies. We get asked quite frequently if object movies can be embedded in panoramas and vice versa. You can and it makes perfect sense for a project like this.

We encourage you to check out their other training projects for different aircrafts:

• Virtual Training of a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 aircraft
• Virtual Training of a Boeing 737 300-500 aircraft

You can learn about how to do this by checking out Hopki’s post here.

We hope the month of May is treating you all well! We also hope that we will be able to meet some of you at the next IVRPA conference in Québec City, Canada.

IVRPA stands for International Virtual Reality Photography Association and is “an international association of professionals who create and produce 360° interactive, immersive images, also called 360° panoramas.”

Every year, the IVRPA holds a conference that is held in a different location; usually alternating between the European and North American continents. Every year we participate.

This year, we will be presenting Pano2VR 5’s most notable features and workflows plus we’ll talk about Object2VR. We will also be there to answer your questions or to simply “talk shop”.

If you’ll be attending, please stop by and say, “Hello!” We’re looking forward to meeting you!

Please note, that most of the team will be in attendance so email support and forum replies may be delayed.

If you are like me, you might have been a little sad about not being at the IVRPA conference this year. You may have been even more sad to have missed Thomas’ talk (which was also streamed live). Thomas presented features that will come to Pano2VR 5.1 and gave a sneak peak into Object2VR 4.

Here is the recorded version:

We would like to especially thank Danila Razin for the video production and the IVRPA for organizing the event. If you would like to watch all the talks, join the IVRPA to get access to the archives.

We welcome the month of July with a bugfix release for Pano2VR 5.0.

The release adds an API key field as required for displaying/embedding Google Maps for every new project that uses a map. You can find this API key field in the Maps skin element.

As a reminder: On Windows, you might get a “Connection Error” after checking for updates with Pano2VR 5.0. In case this occurs, you will need to manually download the update from the Pano2VR download page.

Happy August to you!

We’d like to bring your attention to Hopki’s latest tutorial for Pano2VR 5. This one teaches us how to create animated hotspots within the Skin Editor. Hopki (aka Martin) uses the Rectangle element to create the hotspot image and then uses a Timer and Logic Blocks to create the pulsing hotspot:

Check out the tutorial:

For this tip, we assume you are already familiar with making custom point hotspots and have used the logic blocks a little. But, if there are concepts here that are new to you, let us point out some articles to help you in case you want to jump right in:

• point hotspots
• hotspot template
• logic blocks
• true/false variable
• timer
• skin actions

Today, we’ve got some good stuff for you! The third edition of Thomas Bredenfeld’s book (auf Deutsch) and a new Lynda.com course both feature Pano2VR and we’ve added a new forum section for skin components.

Digitale Fotopraxis Panoramafotografie

For our German-speaking friends, Thomas Bredenfeld has published the third edition of his training book for creating panoramas. We found the previous editions to be excellent and his latest book doesn’t disappoint.

From the publisher:

Thomas Bredenfeld führt Sie in die Welt der digitalen Panoramafotografie: Erfahren Sie, welche Ausrüstung sinnvoll ist, lernen Sie anhand von anschaulichen Beispielen die richtige Aufnahmetechnik kennen und wie Sie Ihre Fotos zusammenfügen. Mit Schritt-für-Schritt-Anleitungen schaffen Sie schnell und leicht den Einstieg in den komplexen Workflow.

- Techniken für Einsteiger und Profis: von der Aufnahme bis zur Ausgabe
- Ausrüstungstipps für alle Budgets, von der GoPro bis zur DSLR
- Praktische Arbeitsbeispiele: Schritt für Schritt zu spektakulären Panoramen

Get it on Amazon.de or via the publisher.

Lynda.com: Creating 360-Degree Panoramas and Interactive Tours

Ron Pepper (long-time panorama photographer) has teamed up with Richard Harrington to bring us a wonderful Lynda tutorial.

Most of the tutorial explains (quite thoroughly) the process of shooting panoramas. We also learn about stitching and HDR processing in PTGui. But what we like the most are the Pano2VR tutorials!

Ron uses Pano2VR to convert a spherical panorama to cube faces (which includes creating a droplet), to patch images, and to build a tour in Pano2VR Pro. To watch the full tutorial, you will need to be a Lynda.com member or you can start a free trial. If you’re unfamiliar with Lynda tutorials, now is a great time to look into this resource.

New Forum: Skin Components

We have recently added a new forum to help support skin components. Here, you’ll find Hopki (our in-house Skin Editor master) posting how-to videos and sharing his own components.

The first one he has shared is a component for an image gallery. This is great for when you want to show some flat stills that are related to your panorama. There are two in the styles of Simplex and Silhouette.

So, go ahead and check them out! You don’t have to be a forum member to view and download the components; only to post to the forum.

Did you know…

…that in Pano2VR Pro, you can quickly move through tour nodes in the Viewer just by ALT-clicking the hotspot?

Has two years passed by already?

Once again, we will be attending photokina which is an enormous photo/video/VR/AR trade fair that takes place in Cologne, Germany. I think the best way to describe it is that it’s like a big adult playground for anyone interested in any kind of work with images. The fair takes place from 20. - 25. September.

This year, we will be at the IVRPA stand in Hall 9.1.

Where you’ll find us.

Be sure to stop by, say “Hi!” and check out the upcoming Pano2VR 5.1.

Did you know …

… that Object2VR Studio has a feature called, Watched Folder? If your camera is not supported, you can simply tell Object2VR to watch a specific folder for images.

It’s hump day. A good day for a bug-fix release, wouldn’t you say?

Object2VR 3.1.1 is available and fixes a bug that was occurring with macOS X Sierra. But, we didn’t just fix bugs, we also added touch support for Microsoft Edge.

Grab the update from the Downloads section.

You can also go to Help> Check for Updates in the Menu bar on Windows. On a Mac, you’ll need to manually download and update.

This is a bug fix release for Pano2VR 5.0.

The following issues have been fixed:

• Fix for Android/Firefox roll bug in cardboard
• Fix for iframe flickering in iOS 10
• Added Portuguese (Brazil) translation
• Disabled file size for all tiles
• Added p2q_embed_object.js back for QTVR export

Grab the update from our download page.

Book: Panorama Fotografie

We would also like to inform our German-speaking users about a new book: Panorama Fotografie by Harald Tedesco. It covers both PTGui and Pano2VR!

Did you know…

…that you can access offline documentation from within Pano2VR?

It’s off by default, but you can enable it by going to the Preferences/Settings and selecting, Show offline help. Then, go to the Help menu and click, Help. You’ll also find a link to our video tutorials on YouTube.

Back in June of 2015, as we hope you all know, we released Pano2VR 5 which was a major update from version 4 featuring a whole new interface. The central part of the interface is an interactive Viewer that makes patching, adding videos and hotspots, etc. a breeze.

Now, we are presenting you with our biggest update since and it’s packed with new features. The most fun, by far, is the support for multiple projections. The projections can be dynamically changed in the Viewer, in the output and even within the Animation Editor. And that’s not only for still panoramas, but also for 360º video.

Read on to learn more about the update or jump right to our videos that show you all the new stuff!

Projections in the Viewer

Projections

Multiple projections are available in Pano2VR’s Viewer, the Animation Editor, and of course on output (HTML5 - WebGL, Desktop, iPhone, etc.).

Fly in settings in Viewing Parameters

• Rectilinear, Fisheye, Stereographic (Little Planet) projections
• Pixel accurate (no wavy lines)
• Supports gigapixel images (multiresolution)
• Fly-in effect
• Can be controlled or triggered with skin actions and logic blocks

See more.

New Skin Elements

It is now easier to create video pop-ups in your projects. Just use the new video skin element or simply use one of the new built-in components.

• Video Element that can playback your self-hosted video or videos from YouTube and Vimeo.
• Seek Bar that allows for scrubbing through any media element (i.e. background sound, video panorama, etc.).
• Dynamically change projections with skin actions

See more.

Animation Editor

The animation editor gained a new track - have you guessed it? Projections!

Yes, the animation editor now supports projections and 360º video with easy controls and track editing to dynamically transition between projections. Currently, 360º video animation only works on macOS.

Little planet in Animation Editor

• Dynamic transitioning of projections
• Clipping warnings
• 360 video panorama support

360 Video Panoramas

We’ve supported 360 video panoramas since 2007 but processing them always needed a few steps. One of them being that the video had to first be converted to a 3x2 format. You might be happy to hear that we’ve eliminated that step! Just add the video file (and a poster image) and output to HTML5. And, of course, you can change projections!

See more.

General

• Auto tagging of images for even better filtering
• Change polygon hotspots color and show/hide them using skin actions
• New format: VR horizontal strip compatible with GearVR

Download

This is a free update for all version 5 users.

You can get your hands on the beta here.

You can run the beta next to your existing version of Pano2VR. Just download and rename the application’s name to something like, Pano2VR 5.1 beta.app.

Examples, Tutorials and Documentation

We have prepared videos to help you learn more about the new features.

• Check out the playlist on YouTube.

Hopefully, we can inspire you with some examples we’ve put together using projections and animation.

• Examples page.

And finally, we have a dedicated documentation page for the beta release.

• Beta documentation

Panorama images © Panedia

Today we’ve published a few tutorials and we hope you’ll find them useful.

Arranging Windows

Pano2VR’s interface is easy to customize for your needs. You can rearrange panels and then save the layouts for later use. Here, you see exactly how this is done:

Introduction to the Skin Editor

We also have a few new Skin Editor tutorials.

First, check out the introduction to get a quick understanding of how to use the Skin Editor:

Then, learn how you can share and save skin elements:

And finally, learn how to quickly change the color of a skin:

More tutorials are on their way, so keep an eye out for them!

Happy December!

We are happy to start this month by featuring an impressive virtual tour built by Lauri Veerde for Tallinn University in Estonia.

Once you step inside you are greeted with a beautiful aerial shot of the campus. The interface (skin) is minimal and the custom hotspots are brilliant. Hovering over them will fill the hotspot with an image and title of where that hotspot is pointing.

I reached out to Lauri to ask him to provide a little info about the project:

The virtual tour of Tallinn University consists of 30 equirectangular panoramas. 1 panorama is shot using a drone. 4 panoramas are shot using a monopod. In 4 panoramas you can see pinned and aligned video (movement inside the photo).

The opening aerial view was shot using a DJI Inspire 1 (with Zenmuse X3) with a total of 21 exposure bracketed images.

You can also see excellent examples of aligned video, too, of which Lauri explains:

From a technical point of view the most challenging part in creating this tour was the pinned and aligned videos - simply because I had not used this technique before. I did not make any tests implementing the video inside panoramas - I just hoped my experience would not fail me. Well it almost did, because later I found out that the movements did not loop so well and the videos were shot with an angle that was almost too wide to stitch. So next time I shoot videos for this kind of work, I will remember to carefully plan the movements of people so the video will be perfectly loop-able.

Lauri brought up a few good points here — to remember to plan the videos for looping and that aligning video can be challenging. So, if you’re looking to include aligned video in your tours, take the time to test it out.

One panorama, The Sound Studio, uses pinned video, aligned video and directional sound.

Another example of aligned video is found in the Ground Floor of the Silva building.

When asked what is his favorite panorama in the tour he mentioned the Ceremonial Hall:

One my favourite panoramas in this tour is the Ceremonial hall because of the captured moment when the graduate, holding a yellow flower, photographed his friend. I have found it is more satisfying for me not to arrange the shoots but to wait for things to happen naturally and try to capture this perfect moment.

We hope you will take the time to check out Lauri’s project and will find some inspiration. You will find more of his work on his website: http://www.tuur.ee.

Learn more:

• Pinned Video
• Directional Sound
• Tour Building
• Aligning Video
• Skin Editor

As this is the package season of the year, we’d like to give you a little stocking stuffer:

The Garden Gnome Package Viewer

The package viewer is a desktop application that lets you easily view your Pano2VR or Object2VR projects offline; without uploading to a web server or viewing in a browser. You can not only open our package output format, but also HTML pages that you find in the output folder.

Here (& here) you can find out, how to wrap those packages all year long not just in the holiday season.

Wishing you a joyous holiday season with peace & cheer in the New Year!

The Garden Gnome Software Team,
Thomas, Karyn, Martin, Christoph