Kaidan and Infinite Pictures have announced a new imaging product that will allow users to make spherical panoramic images. According to the two companies:
"Infinite Pictures (tm) and Kaidan (tm) announced today the SmoothMove(tm) Spherical Photo Solution, a product that allows users to quickly and accurately photograph a scene in as few as ten photos and easily seam them together into a full spherical high-resolution panorama. Panoramas are compact enough to be e-mailed, posted on Web sites, and distributed on CD-ROMs, and yet detailed enough to permit high-quality panoramic printing and zooming without loss of detail or pixelation. The SmoothMove Spherical Photo Solution includes the Kaidan QuickPan(tm) Spherical Panoramic Tripod Head and the Infinite Pictures SmoothMove Photo Suite.
Until now, most digital panoramas had restricted vertical views – one could not look all the way up and down. Such "cylindrical" panoramas come from a single row of photos taken around the horizon. In contrast, panoramas from the patent-pending SmoothMove Spherical Photo Solution product come from two or more rows of photos, one of the upper hemisphere and one of the lower
hemisphere at a minimum (depending on the lens used). The multiple rows of overlapping photos cover the entire scene and allow full vertical views of the scene. A spherical panorama is then automatically seamed from ten photos using a standard 35mm camera and 14mm lens."
Panoramas made with The Infinite Pictures SmoothMove Photo Suite can be output as QuickTIme VR files as well as the SmoothMove format.
While the viewer and browser plugins for this new technology are available for the Mac and PC, the Infinite Pictures SmoothMove Photo Suite is still under production for the Mac.
Pricing for the Infinite Pictures SmoothMove Photo Suite is set at US$1499 with no time frame for Mac availability released as yet.
Kaidan - Infinite Pictures
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