scurvypirates

This post was originally going to be a shoot-out between AutoStitch which has been in the App Store for awhile, and the newly released 360 Panorama App, which was published by Occipital, the same company that brought us Red Laser (which by the way, was recently purchased by eBay). Unfortunately there is nothing to compare. 360 Panorama is a joke. After spending $2.99, I feel like I made a contribution to Occipital’s AR (augmented reality) research and development fund, because this app is not a Photography app. AutoStitch, on the other hand, is thoughtfully-designed to be useful, and creates amazing results. For both tests below, I was using an iPhone 3GS with iOS 4.0.1.

How you use 360 Panorama
You launch the app, hold your phone in the air, tap the screen, then you slowly rotate where you are standing, while passers-by think out loud, what in the fuck is that guy doing? What may seem odd turns sarcastically funny when you look at the result, only the joke is on you. The resulting image is poor quality, with visible overlaps, jagged transitions, hardly something you want to share with anyone you know.

How you use AutoStitch
First of all, you don’t actually shoot through AutoStitch. So it’s not a camera app per se, it’s more of a post processing app. The first time you launch it, you get instructions that tell you to exit the app, and shoot a series of still shots through the native camera, making sure the images overlap in terms of point of view. Once you have created and saved a bunch of successive images to your camera roll, you go back and launch the app, choose the images you want to stitch together, and the app takes it from there. The results are amazing. There is a crop tool inside the app that auto-crops, or allows you to drag the corners for custom cropping, and it then saves a high resolution file to your camera roll.

The images below were shot during a recent weather event that created amazing light and a variety of colors and clouds during sunset. You tell me which image is the result of $2.99 well spent, and which one looks like R2D2 ate a bunch of mushrooms.

Sunset shot with iPhone 3GS and AutoStitch App

Click the image above for a larger version. This was composited by AutoStitch from 19 different still shots. As instructed, I made sure each image overlapped the previous, as I moved from left to right to capture about 180 degrees of this beautiful sunset. Then I launched the app, selected the sequence from my camera roll, and created the pano. I then uploaded straight to my Facebook Wall, and sat back for the oohing and aahing to begin. I even had a professional photographer friend ask what I shot this with. If you want to get AutoStitch, and you are convinced by this review, the good captain is an iTunes affiliate, so click here if you are convinced and want to pony up for AutoStitch.

WTF? Really? I expected so much more from 360 Panorama App

I don’t even know what to say about this. 360 Panorama supposedly uses live video input, and uses GPS pitch, roll, and yaw data and takes the image in realtime, but the results are not very impressive. I can’t recommend this app to anyone, and frankly, can’t believe it ever got approved as a paid app in the first place. Maybe it is a hint of things to come with some cool technology that Occipital is working on, but for a consumer, it’s a dead fish.

I’ve seen this term getting tossed around a lot lately, the splinternet, more so in the last few weeks than ever before. After all, Apple claims to have sold over 1 million iPad devices in 28 days (about half as long as it took them to sell 1 million first generation iPhones). Facebook has begun colonizing web content on other site experiences by rolling out their “Like” feature. The rumors out there estimated that over 50,000 external sites had already implemented the simple line of code from Facebook in just the first week it was released, so visitors to these external sites could share content within Facebook. Then there is Google. Google has benefited and profited mightily from bringing the web together, and serving ads within alongside the order inherent in the chaos of the web. But this chaos of information, neatly indexed and ranked for relevancy and recency is not the endgame any longer. Facebook is colonizing content on the web that is locking Google out behind their user’s IDs, and Apple is pushing and perpetuating their own proprietary platforms. And they are controlling every aspect of that experience: from apps to ads to analytics.

To the casual web user, this concept is maybe too high-level to be aware of over the course of everyday web browsing, status updates, and app usage. This is all pretty new stuff. What do you think? Bernoff’s article seems to set up this epic battle of Apple vs. Facebook. I’m not so sure if it’s one vs. the other. I think it’s more like this:  Apple+Facebook+Google= a totally new web experience.

Thoughts?