After a very very long wait finally Forza 3 arrived! The first panoramic view of a 1-series BMW in Forza 3:
Finally a game where I can drive that car!
Source: http://www.forzaclans.com
“In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now, God knows,
Anything Goes.”
Das Entwickler-Büro #1 ist bereits 99% fertiggestellt… auch sonst sind die Räumlichkeiten nun fast komplett 
Also deshalb auch ein paar Update Panoramen:
(Achim am Gerät)
There was the Digital Image Suite and several other tools like Hugin and Cool360 which I used over the last years to create panoramic images. Now there’s a new tool available in 32 and 64 bit (for really really huge images!) from Microsoft Research. It’s free at this point and if you’re on Windows it’s definitely worth the try.
“Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. You shoot a set of overlapping photographs of a scene from a single location, and Image Composite Editor creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all your images at full resolution. Then save your stitched panorama in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom.”
New York this time… hmmm looks sweet…
… it seems that there people at the Nürburgring do have a problem with tree decimation… the over one year old Project Gotham Racing 3 Nürburgring had significantly more trees…
This is the Forza Motorsport 2 Nürburgring:
(Forza Motorsport 2)
… remember when I had the exact same location pictured before in Project Gotham Racing 3:
(Project Gotham Racing 3)
Stitching software and digital cameras make panoramic photos far easier than ever before. However, to get the best results, you need a special tripod head. These can cost hundreds of dollars, but making your own isn’t that hard. Even better, it’s dirt cheap.
Source: http://www.worth1000.com/tutorial.asp?sid=161123&print=1
Yes I am alive… I took some days off so here we are back in business. There will be some articles about the things I did the last days…and of course as usual: many pictures.
I start the series with the visit to the Zoo of Erfurt:
Of course I made some panoramic views:
this and the next one show the enclosure where the turtles and the cows live
the monkeys live here…(no island)
Here are the three movies I made:
and another panoramic view straigt out of Project Gotham Racing 3 (ignore the red Enzo please)…
Gamers rejoice! Today there were some really great updates in the XBOX 360 queue. The most interesting one is the update for Project Gotham Racing 3 – one of the launch titles of the 360. You finally can export the pictures you took in “Photo Mode” to your computer. Just select the picture and send it to your “Your Photos”-Webpage and grab them from there.
I straight went onto the track with the Sagaris to take some test pictures:
yes, HDR…
yes, panoramic view…
I just can say: WOW! That’s what I was looking for when I used the “Photo Mode” over half a year ago for the first time…Oh…I forgot to mention that they are also doing a competition…if you want to take part…here’s the info you need.
Source 1: http://projectgothamracing3.com/photos/PhotoGallery
Source 2: http://www.bizarreonline.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=216755
After several really really hot days we’re finally getting some rain…temperatures dropping to 26 degree celsius…
“Taken by Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong, this pan shows lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin unpacking the EASEP which stands for the Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package, from the side of Lunar Module ‘Eagle’.”
This is only one of several other panoramic views of the moon.
Source: http://moonpans.co.uk/vr/
After last years FIWAK, FeM is back in the forest. This year with even more hardware, even more people and even more tents.
The first lecture starts in just a few minutes so stay tuned for more news on the FIWAK 06.
Source: FeM FIWAK Homepage
And those noisy crowd watched it…
Once again I reorganised my desktop. One display less now, but much more working space on the left-hand.
Here are some impressions of the training in Dortmund. Quite many information and hopefully a brand new e-class test setup in the next months.
Impressingly enough: the 1.8l 4 cylinder engine of this Toyota made 100km with about 25l… the display even showed 90,9l/100km from time to time…quite frightening.
Oh and some words to the Toyota itself: bad gearbox, even worse the ride. The clutch: nightmare. To be fair: everything was brand new: the car only had 57km on the clock. Oh: It’s no SIXT rental car…I never got any japanese plastic-bombers from them… THANK GOD!
And small panoramic view of the training room:
Hey it’s april! And on my way home I took some pictures…giving you an impression of the cloudy sky which is characteristic for Ilmenau at this time of the year…
Since my girlfriend has two turtles we wanted to check out the reptiles exhibition in Erfurt. Which we didn’t because, well lets call it disappointment in the first place.
To small. To dubious. Well… you get the idea. And 12 Euro for 1700 qm is quite a price…
Then we decided to take a walk in the old town of Erfurt. Where we found a new product…(sorry, german only joke)
I am at the Microsoft Studentpartner Summit 2006 in Duesseldorf-Mettmann at the moment. And of course I made some panoramic views:
Man, I was exhausted after one day – as usual. But after all it was a great day with many great talks. Even Promise listened to what I had to say… and that’s astonishing…
But since I had the chance to sneak behind the scenes at the Microsoft booth I want to present you a little bit of the pictures I just made…:
I thought winter would be over after seeing the temperatures raise on the 19th of February…
But I should have known better… so it was more like this today:
Just not to forget… a picture of warmer times:
What a great idea of maednes to bring his old NES console for a quick game. Since he also brought most of the best games that ever were releases for the NES (Dynablaster, SMB1,SMB3,…) fun was guaranteed.
I was asked today what tools I use to create the panoramic views on this website. I personally prefer easy to use – “let the automatic do”-tools. That’s why I used Ulead Cool360 for years to create the panoramic views. But since some months I am using the brand new Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006 to create the panoramic views out of the raw pictures.
The first step is to load all the pictures into the Suite:
then Tools→Panoramic Stitching…
then you have to select which pictures you want to use for the panoramic stitching process:
Digital Image Suite now creates a preview for you where you can adjust in whatever way you like – unfortunately no perspective adjustments are possible – but normally not necessary if you took the pictures well:
Click Next and you get the “Stitching in Progress” Dialog…waiting … waiting …
And finally: The Result! You have to select the display window – because maybe – like in my example – the pictures are a bit tilted.
Oh… if you want all that a little bit more compressed…have a look at the demo video I made:
Source 1: Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006
Source 2: Demo Video
We only had the time to test one lecture hall today – and this is our current setup which worked quite good:
A complete listing from where to where the signals are routed will be available tomorrow.
the headless encoding pc kinda broke for a second.
…and the mandatory panoramic views:
Since we are kind of interested in providing a large user DECT network on the campus of our university we spoke with the Eventphone guys about their setup: and as far as we can tell it’s far more sophisticated than expected.
little panoramic view of the POC server room
the Alcatel machine rear view
patch panel
front view
front view with logo
switching switch
audio patch panel
the actual POC service area in the main hall
Well sorry that there are more pictures than text – it’s just because we have to compile all the information we got and pile it all together into a nice and well understandable text for your reading pleasure.
Well here we are – packed with equipment we arrived in Berlin and successfully tested the first encoding-run for the upcoming 22c3 which starts in two days.
hmm… bad weather
this text was on the equipment to discourage thieves
rest place at the A9
finally some food – well maedness had some sandwiches – but finally something hot
the fairy dust has landed
Since we arrived we unpacked all the equpiment and drawn-in our new “office” for the next days: the video studio – which is kind of above/around hall 1.
so here we are… on the right side you can see into hall 1 through the window.
concentrated calculating power – our four encoding machines + one fallback.
Funny thing beside that: we got our own /24 subnet here – peered with 10GE directly to the Berlin CIX. How cool is that 
This is just a part of the stuff we’re going to take with us for the 22c3:
hrhr…2 Sony HDR-FX-1E, 2 Sony VX-2100, 1 Sony VX-2000, 5 Shuttle XPCs, 4 Shuttle 19″ TFT displays…
well..it’s over… some impressions – more to come:
I spent the whole day in Dresden – introducing Lars Iwer into his new job at Microsoft. But because that did not take the whole day I had some time to walk along Dresden. Actually I underestimated the fact that it’s getting dark quite early at wintertimes. That and because my digital camera isn’t as good as it should be is the cause that there are just some panoramic views from Dresden – not showing any of the usual sights . Oh. I should mention the heroic presentation the Ford Galaxy gave us – yes, Sixt decided to give me another one after the death of the first one.
who designed that?!
since the big picture is >19000 pixels width you can
get a medium size version here.
The first day of lectures is over and it was quite a success because more people than expected wanted to hear our talks…
sickboy talking.
we illuminated the Audimax….yellow and blue: the FeM colors.
thx to teliko for the pictures
On thursday the spontaneous idea came up to have a short break (4 days) at the beach. It was cold though – but nevertheless I love the sea (baltic sea in this particular case).
And of course there are some panoramic views .
Oh by the way: Who knows where this is?
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