Herro Flom Japan

The second I woke up this morning I had a blinding flash of inspiration. I created a makeshift monopod for my Sony Clie PEG-NX70V using a Swiss army knife, a long piece of dental floss and the clip from a broken Mickey Mouse keitai strap. (I really wanted to use duct tape to make it an official McGiver hack but couldn't figure out how to fit it into the equation.)

Here's the entire process. The clip attaches to the Clie right under the camera, the floss is tied to the clip and the Swiss army knife acts as a plumb bob so the Clie's video camera stays relatively the same height and location. I shoot a video of everywhere from top to bottom, 360 degrees around, while trying to keep the camera's lens rotating around the same point in space. The MPEG gets imported into the PC where I delete the crappy parts with QuickTime. Then I export one or two frames per second as JPEGs — about 150-400 images in all. Those get fed into AutoStitch, which theoretically should piece them all together into one image. When the image is viewed with the PTviewer Java applet, it should look fairly good, although relatively low res since the Clie's video camera only does 160 X 120. Maybe I should try taking stills at 640 X 480.

There are lots of autostitched photos in flickr under the tags autostitch and composite. And beautiful QuickTime panoramas from around the world (along with the moon and Mars) at panoramas.dk.

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Click and drag on the image to scroll around. If you're saying, "What image?" then you need to install Java. Go ahead. It's good for you.

That's the back of our house. The house on the other side of the "street" with all the shrubbery in front of it is my father in law's house.

I made this with very little effort and no practice. That's why it's kinda crappy. I simply stood in one spot and "painted" the scene with my Sony Clie's 160×120 pixel video camera; no tripod, no nuthin', I simply filmed everywhere. I downloaded the MPEG-4 movie to my PC and exported about three frames a second to JPEG using QuickTime. Then I pointed AutoStitch at the directory full of images. It did the rest.

There are ways to create higher quality panoramas, but they take lots of time, effort and an investment in hardware. But for what I want to do–take a quick immersive snapshot so listeners can get a clearer image of what they're hearing–I'm happy with it. Take a look here for some stunningly beautiful hi-res panoramas of Japan.

You can see most of the path I took on the walk from the door to the rice field full of frogs. The door's in front of you. Pan left. I walked up the alley then turned right. The rice field is right behind the white truck parked in the driveway of grandpa's house.

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Good-Audio.com Products

US $30 for a set of binaural mics, $5 international shipping. The sample MP3 files sound very good.

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