HD View usage in Auto Show collection

MSNBC launched the Detroit Auto Show Collection using HD View. You may have to install the HD View plug-in if you are not having.

Enjoy using the zooming in for viewing the small details. And also scroll horizontally to get the actual feel of the show.

The media team at MSNBC also used the Windows Live Photo Gallery stitching technology in order to create the final HD View experiences.

You can also click here to go directly to Slide show.

HD View v. Google Earth 4.2 Photo Viewing Compared

Here's a comparison between Gigapixel and panoramic support for Google Earth announced recently with HD View beta as posted in the HD View Blog.
You will have to install HD View plugin if it has not been installed about which I had posted here.

The author did the comparison by uploading a large 360 degree panorama of Mt. Rainier to the Gigapan site and used their tool to geocode its position. This generated a kml file which was opened with Google Earth. Then he created an HD View page for the same panorama.
Here's the table summarizing the key features:

Feature	Google Earth 4.2 Photo Viewing	HD View
Integrated in a world browsing application	YES	NO
Use it on your own web site	NO	YES
Handles arbitrarily large images	YES	YES
Supports panoramic images	YES *	YES
Uses GPU acceleration	YES	YES
Dynamically change projection depending on zoom level	NO	YES
Dynamic tone adjustment	NO	YES
Uses HD Photo (JPEG XR) for up to 50% faster download times	NO	YES
Has a blog dedicated to immersive images	:(	:)

And the author gives these links to try for yourself by exploring Mt. Rainier image.

(1) Gigapan Flash Viewer, (2) from Gigapan page select View in Google Earth 4.2, (3) HD View

HD View Beta 2 Released

The major new features in HD View Beta 2 are:
Support for FireFox. Now, if you use FireFox to browse a HD View site , then you'll be prompted to install the HD View plugin.

Auto Tone Adjust.You will now see one of these icons in the top right corner. Details of this feature is available at http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/HDView/HDhelp.htm
The basic idea is that HD View now acts a bit like the auto-gain of your camera. So as you zoom into dark regions you should see additional shadow details. It actually is more sophisticated than auto-gain and generally produces better looking images.

beta2 is smaller in size than beta1.

Check out this for sites using HD View.

HD View plugin for IE is available here.
HD View plugin for FireFox is available here.

Please check http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/HDView/HDabout.htm for more info on HD View.

HD view demo

In one of my earlier post, I had posted about HD view developed by Microsoft Research. Now you can have that technology demo given during TechFest '07 in this amazing video.
The camera shown works with HD view which can take very very big pictures, for creating pictures upto 5 Gigapixels that is 5 billion pixels. No single shot can get a picture that big, so its assembled using lots of smaller pictures. The camera shown takes such picture and to view them , Microsoft released the HD viewer.
So check out this amazing video on10 and also this HD view site which went Live recently.

HD View utilities from Microsoft

HD View is a new viewer developed by Microsoft Research's Interactive Visual Media group to aid in the display and interaction with very large images.
Recent advances in camera and sensor technology and software for stitching images together has led to the creation of images containing billions of pixels (gigapixels). These images are often panoramic, that is, they cover very wide fields of view. Since monitors typically contain only one to two million pixels, it is only possible to actually see 1/1000th of such image data at once. Also, viewing very wide fields of view require unwrapping of an image projected onto a curved surface (think of a map of the world) which can cause distortions.
Recently MS released a set of tools, HD View utilities to help in the production of HD View content.