I use a great tool called AutoStitch to create these panoramas from individual photos. You just have to manually adjust your focus and exposure and then rotate in place while shooting away. As long as there’s some overlap between shots and the lighting is consistent, it does a pretty good job of merging photos automatically. For this scene, I had to stitch a few groups independently and then stitch those mini-panos into the full panorama. You can see above that the lighting had changed due to shifting clouds and the complexity of the bushes even thwarted my own pattern matching capability. The photos that I took a few weeks ago stitched a little more easily and capture a more cheerful vista.

That’s not the end of my tale, however. I continued walking around the lake, expecting that I would be able to make a full revolution because the weather had been pleasant for quite a while and I had been watching our stream gauge reading drop daily in anticipation of a nice stroll. Unfortunately, when I got to the inlet that connects the river with the lake, I found that I wouldn’t be able to ford it while keeping myself dry below the knees. Not unless I had an olympic-class long jump.

You can now learn some basic geology about the White River and 100 Acres on the IMA website, thanks to our collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey. There’s still more information to come about floods and we’re also looking into adding some guidelines that will help IMA staff and visitors determine when the park is flooded.

From what I’ve learned, the inlet is more complicated – the water level there depends on the amount of water flowing in the river, the amount of water that has entered (from both the river and precipitation) and exited the lake, and the rate of evaporation. If we can solve that puzzle we’ll be able to determine when it’s possible to hike all the way around the lake. For now, just keep in mind that even after a few days of fair weather the inlet may be too wide to cross without getting wet.

Photosynth screen capture showing the Asian Gallery at the IMA

As you read on, you’ll probably discover that I had way too much fun with this tool, and I hope you will as well.

I tried three separate experiments.

#1: Staged Photography

First, I asked Mike Rippy, from our photography department, to shoot a variety of overview and detail shots of a portion of our Asian Galleries.  These images all have consistent lighting and were shot using a tripod, so they are extremely sharp.  The image above shows a case of works, and the faint white box is indicating that a more detailed image was shot at that point.  Photosynth does the best it can to “automagically” stitch together photographs of the same region even if they were shot at different angles.  For the most part it did an amazing job.

Zoom Detail Example

In the image above I am showing two captures of the same view in Photosynth.  On the left half you see the overview of a hanging scroll.  As you zoom in with your mousewheel, more and more detail comes to life as seen the in right half.  This ability to see pristine detail on works of art is very seldom seen.

Automatic Object VR

Another reason I see this tool as taking panoramic tools to the next level is its automatic object vr detection.  When taking pictures of a 3D work from multiple angles, Photosynth displays the “donut” control above.  You can grab and turn the object, and new images page in and out to give the feeling that you are spinning the work in space.

#2: The Mob

As a second test I asked a group of people to help me raid the European Galleries.  About a dozen people took 30 minutes to shoot over 1400 images of the space.  The point of this test was to see if Photosynth could handle photographs from a wide variety of cameras.  They ranged from your $100 point-and-shoot to your $1000 digital SLR.  For the most part it handled the task fairly well.  The final product, which I link to below, consisted of about half of the images due to the large amount of time it took to create.

#3: Nature

Finally I shot a more traditional panorama in the 100 Acres.  Photosynth did a really good job stitching these photos together as well.  I thought the complexity of nature might pose a difficult task.

100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park

The Results:

You can see all three of the Photosynth’s I created at these links:

• Asian Galleries
• European Gallery
• 100 Acres

Did I mention they are embeddable?