CleVr 360

I even used hot spots!!!!

 

Panorama of Huntindon on CleVR.com

Project Description: "Create a Panoramic 360 Degree Movie using CleVR. Find your favorite spot and take a series of pictures with your digital camera."

Overview: This was the second assignment we undertook in IT 644 and this one seriously made me wonder what I had gotten myself into. I work with a digital camera on a fairly regular basis in the technology class that I teach and am familiar with its use and functions to the extent that I thought this project would be a breeze. Not so much. This assignment was my first encounter with the truth that technology sometimes takes a lot of practice and you cannot sit down with a new application and expect to have a perfect product in one afternoon.

I do like the CleVR software, especially for the fact that it is free and online. Uploading still snapshots to it was very easy. However, because it is free, it has limitations. One of the chief limitations of the software application is that you cannot manually manipulate how the program stitches your photographs together. One instructional source stated that I needed to have 10-15% overlap in my images for them to successfully stitch together. Another source told me that I needed a much larger percentage of overlap than that. There was also some variation of how many snapshots were needed to make a 360 degree panorama, which ranged anywhere from six photos to 20 photos. What I ended up having to do was to try each version of instructions until I achieved the best result. Another problem with CleVR is that to create the panorama, you have to go through a couple of stages of uploading and during the uploading/stitching process, for some unknown reason, the program would drop several of my photographs. I ended up re-shooting just those snapshots that were routinely dropped and manipulating them back into the project. It was a little frustrating, but the basic principles of panorama photography were effectively delivered and overall, this would a good assignment to work with.

For my class project I shot the street that I live on. I used a tripod and this helped me keep track of my shots so that I could add in just the shots that the program dropped. CleVR has hot spots as a feature, which lets you select a portion of your photograph and make it interactive be adding text. When the viewer’s cursor passes over the hot spot, they can click on it and the text will be displayed. I put some hot spots into my project, so you can see how they work.

I think the most valuable lesson I learned from CleVR was patience! Overall, however, this was a good tool to work with to learn the basics.