Blogs

If you happen to be around Switzerland next weekend (May 2) or plan to be there in the next 6 months, do not miss the exhibition on the Nidwalder Museum in Stans.

http://www.nidwaldner-museum.ch/dynamic/page_detail.asp?seiid=9&nwcid=60

This exhibition will feature a Gigapixel Print sized 2,5x24 meters from the Swiss Alps shot by Matthias Taugwalder about two months ago.

The rise of Social Web to every corner of the Internet is undeniably this days and I have noted that the IVRPA is also starting to ride this trend.

You can follow the IVRPA on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ivrpa
On LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1906190
And on Facebook starting today: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=67806473343

Is this good or bad for the IVRPA?

I think that spreading the word about the IVRPA is a good thing and social networks may help other people interested in VR Photography know what we do and possibly join in as members of our association.

Many of you noticed last January that our website then hosted at http://bluehost.com suffered some outages when they decided that ivrpa.org was using too much resources, particularly they blamed MySQL queries and took us off the air.

On our very first Board of Directors chat meeting, three Committees where created:

Website Committee (Web Team)

Matthias Taugwalder
Carlos Chegado
Aaron Spence
and Aldo Hoeben

Cooperation with other associations

Jan van der Woning
with members from the general membership

IVRPA and Identity Committee

Jürgen Schrader
Willy Kaemena
Jan van der Woning

These Committees are not closed, volunteers from the general member base are welcomed to help with our efforts in pushing the association forward.

Hi again,

Sorry for being too lazy to update my blog here at IVRPA.org, I will try to redeem myself in the near future.

But first I would like to say a word to all IVRPA members that I have personally met in Prague and in the last two editions of Photokina, you are a great bunch of people and a talented one too, it is a great pleasure to be part of this community and I look forward to see many of you next October in Albuquerque or in the mean time some of you in Timisoara/Romania at the Panotools Meeting.

At long last, I have implemented an automated system for handling payments from users of the sites becoming a member and/or renewing their membership. Before this, for years, our treasurer was handling each payment manually. This caused (mostly minor) delays, and some confusion among our paying 'customers' (that means you, members!) when payments did not have that 'instant gratification' of getting member privileges.

The International Panorama Council and the Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and of Military History (KLM-MRA) in Brussels are happy to announce the 18th International Panorama Conference 2009 in Belgium. The conference will take place from 29 through 31 March 2009. A post-conference tour to Waterloo Panorama is scheduled on 1 April.

On januari 19, our then-current webhost Bluehost suspended our website due to 'excessive MySQL use'. All our sites, as well as the mailing lists (so in short, all our means of communicating with our membership) were shut down; a hard to miss 'notice' that we had outgrown the services Bluehost was willing to extend us at our shared hosting.

Like Aldo and Ian, I have been working the last 8 months on an automated panohead to make gigapixel panoramas. I had some basic specs in mind, designig it:

I've got an old Loreo 3D lens and just finished playing with it to create an object movie of a small paper kit frog I completed last year. I put the frog on a cheap ¥100 turntable and shot it with the Loreo lens. I was too close so I reshot everything to make the frog clearer. Loreo has a macro 3D lens, but I don't. Anyway, the 3D object movie is kind of neat. I put it together in The VR Worx 2.6.2.

It is visible here. If you don't have a Loreo viewer, you'll just see two rotating frogs: