Realviz, a French maker of image-based content creation software, is demoing its upcoming Mac OS X version of Stitcher at this week’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas.
Stitcher automatically combines horizontally and vertically overlapping photographs to create a fully immersive image that spans a 180-degree vertical and 360 degree horizontal field of view in seconds. Panoramas are color blended, de-blurred and perfectly warped so they can be used without any additional editing, according to Dominique Pouliquen, president and CEO of Realviz. The application is already in use by game developers, Web designers and special effects artists worldwide.
And Realviz is working with Kaidan, a manufacturer of photographic VR hardware, to offer bundles with the immersive imaging software, along with Kaidan’s multi-row panoramic tripod heads.
The professional panoramic stitching tool should see the light of day before summer at a price point of around US$800. The info that Stitcher is coming is good news to fans of such applications as Apple seems to be letting its QTVR Authoring Studio product wither.
“We’re very excited to be working with Realviz,” Kaidan President Jim Anders said in a press announcement. “Their Stitcher software technology is extremely powerful and is a natural product to bundle with our multi-row tripod heads. It provides an excellent solution for those looking to capture high-resolution, high-quality QuickTime VR cubic panoramas without a per-image fee. Stitcher also points the way to future products that combine affordable high-speed motorized capture devices with sophisticated automatic stitching software.”
Stitcher is the first of many Realviz products that will be making their way to the Mac platform. ImageModeler will be the next Realviz application to be available on the Mac platform. The app lets graphics professionals tap directly into the richness of the real world instead of modeling complicated geometry, materials and lighting from scratch, according to the folks at Realviz. Company officials say the software is the first high-end “image-based modeler” to produce virtual 3-D models from photo, video and cinematic images.
“The Macintosh has long been the platform of choice for a wide variety of designers, and has a large installed user-base in the web-design community,” said Guillaume Duboc, Realviz’s VP of worldwide marketing of professional software. “Since our products were introduced, there has been a great demand by artists in the Macintosh community to port our applications, and we are now able to respond to these users’ requests. Our first two products to be ported, Stitcher and ImageModeler, in particular provide the simplest solutions available for designers to build immersive panoramas and photo-real 3D models.”
The next generation of ImageModeler will be introduced for the first time during the upcoming Siggraph 2001 in Los Angeles. The company also plans Mac versions of ReTimer and MatchMover.
ReTimer is “time warp” software designed to slow down or speed up motion sequences. The software utilizes a method for creating new frames between actual frames in a motion or still sequence. MatchMover is a 3D camera tracker that lets users capture live-action camera motion in 3-D (including zoom) by tracking 2-D features in an image sequence.