The future for panoramas on the iPhone may not be Flash anyway. Those
who also read the PanotoolsNG list, please forgive the cross-post
message...
...
CubeWorld is a new panorama viewer for the iPhone. It uses cube faces
(max 1024px) and OpenGL. Read on for comments and URLs.
I had a meeting with a video production and design company yesterday
morning, and I had the 0.0.54 build of CubeWorld on my iPhone. The
meeting went very well; turns out they have a major hotel chain as a
client, and they're very excited at the thought of using high-quality
VR content. CubeWorld wasn't needed to catch their attention (they
were already keen) but showing it at the end was the icing on the
cake.
I always knew being able to show panos on my iPhone would be a
wonderful thing; the best and fastest way to get someone's full
focus, understanding and excitement when first telling them about
panoramas. It grabs people's attention and interest as much as using
CoverFlow to scroll through music on the iPhone, and that's really
saying something!
This implementation is only days old, but it is superb. The latest
build (0.0.55) provides optional separate accellerometer-controlled
(tilt-based) navigation for horizotal and vertical panning, initial
auto-panning, inertia behaviour, and a default zoom level set in the
XML file (i.e. set your zoom level per pano).
Zooming works now, although it isn't yet perfect. The problem of
flickering when hitting the zenith or nadir is fixed.
Scrolling is fluid and responsive, and image quality is as good as you'd expect
dedicated OpenGL rendering at 320x480 pixels to be - in other words, great.
It still makes the display flicker briefly if you step out of the app
without closing the pano first, but that also closes the pano
automatically which means it doesn't continue to flicker. This is
still an issue if you hit the sleep button on the top of the iPhone
while a pano is open; the image is left open in memory, so the
display flickers when you wake it up again until you slide the
on-screen lock. But the problem is purely cosmetic - and not hard to
avoid.
A hit on the battery life has been reported, but I haven't noticed
this yet. I do tend to put the iPhone into its dock when I get home,
which keeps it topped up - but even so, I haven't noticed a change in
battery consumption yet. Nothing that can't be attributed to me
playing with it even more than normal! ;-)
(GENERAL NOTE to all iPod/iPhone users: keeping the battery topped up
will make it last the longest. Don't 'condition' this kind of battery
by letting it run down all the time before charging, that'll actually
shorten its life. A bit.)
Using it involves jailbreaking your iPhone. This does NOT mean
unlocking it from your contract or cell provider, it just means
allowing file-level access to the phone's storage. Devices can be
'put back in jail', and resetting and restoring puts things back to a
virgin state anyway; it isn't a permanent committment.
This product is in alpha-stage development, but I've had no problems.
I suggest those with iPhones consider using it; there's simply no
better way to demonstrate what a pano is to a prospective client, or
*anyone* for that matter.
I also suggest that everyone considers using the Paypal donation
button to help encourage this effort.
(And Apple - take note: this is how it should be done. Showing my
panos to people on this device has already clinched a few iPhone
sales, and the software's only been in alpha for 2 days! You know you
want to... ;-)
k
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