Cubic Panoramas and Flash 10

Flash 10 is getting downloaded at an alarming rate it seems; in the first 6 months, it was at almost 60% market penetration, which is really great, because Flash 10's 3D features should allow us to get a bit better performance, and it should allow us to clean up ALL of the weird tessellation artifacts (the wave in what should be straight lines) and with better performance than we could in Flash 9.  By comparison, PanoSalado uses maximum pixel precision tessellation when the pano is still, but it has to use lower quality rendering when the pano is moving.  With Flash 10, we should have all the quality of a static image with a moving image....

Hello World!

Well, I am finally getting around to writing something here.  The only thing is what....?  

Seeing as I am the more technical guy (Zephyr), i guess I should write about the more technical stuff.  So:

SpinControl:VR
We are working on figuring out some of the obscure peculiarities of Adobe AIR so that when we have a product someone actually pays money for, it will work.  This is one of the reasons why the free demo version of SpinControl has been released -- so everyone who is interested, please download and play with it, and tell us what you like or don't like.  Consider it a sort of public beta, that is going to be continued and improved as we release the versions with all the bells and whistles.

SpinControl:VR is all the pro or hobbyist panographer will need to get a Virtual Tour put together for easy display on the Internet.  And just for clarification's sake, let me say that SpinControl works great for everybody except a small handful of people using Macs who have weird AIR+WebKit issues. These issues are unrelated to SpinControl itself, except that SpinControl:VR runs on AIR. (note: updating AIR to the latest version solves this issue. --ed.)

I would have to say that while I like AIR a lot, it doesn't quite fulfill the promise of running perfectly on every computer out there.  For instance (and good luck finding this peculiarity documented anywhere on the internet): AIR apps will NOT install if you happen to have your computer's clock set to some random date like 2001.  They will simply fail and tell you that the app is bad and to contact the developer, which is wrong and unhelpful.  (The problem is something to do with the security cert and the timestamp on it, if you are wondering, and the solution is to set the clock, but that really shouldn't break AIR entirely, should it?) .  We are seeing some randomly odd "peculiar cases" like that, which are extremely hard to diagnose and debug.  We have another one with Webkit and Flex HTML elements causing the app to crash, with no solid solution yet (other than updating to Safari 4 beta).  But we will find them!

PanoSalado
We have a lot of plans for this.  And now that Michael Rondinelli of EyeSee360 is on board with PanoSalado, we should be seeing a lot of improvements, especially in the video department (VideoWarp Player).  I obviously don't speak for anyone but myself, even here, but for me 3D video has been a really cool thing that isn't quite here yet because the files are too big, there isn't enough horsepower on enough people's computers (mine included), and primarily, Flash has not been up to the task.  And I think that might have changed with Flash 10.  We shall see!  

As you can see, we are working towards bringing PanoSalado to Flash 10's new and improved 3D rendering.  And we might be doing that with or without Papervision3D, since even an ignoramus like myself whose mind gets tired thinking about 3D matrix math, could take a crack at writing a panorama display engine (Thank you Adobe!). 

Zephyr