It’s been a wonderful! Looking back at my earliest panoramas from 2006/2007 and regenerating them taught me a few things.
Evergreen
New technologies do not seem to last in the pano world. There was the Flashificator, Quicktime, Deval VR and Flash panos. We all know what happen. Security problems and all that, they were killed off. Getting users to simply download a plugin is a hassle now. Viewers want something that just-works. No plugins to download and install. Works on their phone, android, iPhones, tablets. It is important to use consortium supported technologies like HTML5 which is backed by the world’s biggest tech companies. Then again, who would have thought Flash will ever come to an end…
Data longevity
Data is more important than ever. I now rely heavily on FreeNAS to store all my stuffs after a good 5 years with Drobo. After moving to FreeNAS, I know what I have been missing out. Speed and running VMs off it. You can always output to the current technology if you have the raw images. Places don’t last at times. We missed out on the Tang Dynasty panoramas. The place is no longer around and has been tore down while some images are corrupted and can no longer be stitched.
Software
Programs that are used to create these panos are generally still around, PTGui, Pano2VR are 2 that are still frequently updated. That being said, we kept images that seemed corrupted. Maybe, just maybe, one day, technology will finally catch up and simple images repair will be simple with no nonsense on websites after websites that claim to be able to repair JPG, RAW that never work.
Time to take a break after updating the panoramas over a whole month.
