Robot Dreams

A few days ago I posted a panorama of the Toronto skyline. It turns out it was done by hand by loading up the images, doing some blending between them, aligning them, and brightness+contrast adjustments. And today, while trying to do the same to another set of images I failed. And I thought maybe someone has written some software to make such things easy. Well they have, somewhat. It turns out panorama stitching is not exactly easy and just about all the solutions out there are manual in more ways than one. Except one tool, which comes from the AI lab at the University of British Columbia, Autostitch. So I decided to run it through some of the multi-shot panorama images I have, really only three sets since I'm not a panorama fan. Below are two of the results. The first from the same set of images as that previous Toronto skyline post (warning this image is even larger than before), and the second from an earlier set of phone images taken at Kauai. But it figures that the set of two images that started this endeavor, Autostitch failed to put together. Neither man nor AI could solve the problem, maybe I just need to wait for some extraterrestrial intelligence.

When someone asks what it means to design a building to fit it's surroundings. This is the example I would show them.

Just a quick update since I've been silent for some time now. Usual stuff is going on, which essentially means a bunch of stuff at once. Most recently John and I took a trip to Toronto to attend part of the C++ Committee meeting being held at the IBM campus. We drove from Chicago, up around Detroit, and across to Toronto. Well, OK, John did all the driving and I did most of the navigation. Since this is the first I attend such a meeting I mostly listened, being clueless as to the details of what was going on. But the conversations during lunch and dinner where highly informative and fun. As usual I took pictures, but I don't have much time to post them right now... For now here's a stitched panorama of the Toronto skyline from the point of view of the Centre Island.

And no you aren't seeing double, Toronto seems fond of erecting buildings in pairs.