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SPi-V dev was created a year and 9 weeks ago, a couple of weeks later I invited a number of beta testers. The site finally went public after the Summit in Sedona.

Some of you may have noticed that my response time has been dropping lately (both on the site and on email). I apologise.

Things are rather busy around here, and will be for another good month. After that month I will have a lot more time for SPi-V and related work, so please bare with me.

I am well underway to finally implement a fix to the dreaded 'fine black lines/non-fitting seams' issue.

This fix was originally slated for a SPi-V 1.3 release, but I may upload a 1.2.x version shortly that implements the fix, after I have done some more testing.

Ever since the first version of Safari, a bug between Safari and Shockwave has been causing an offset to the SPi-V scene. The simply rendered too heigh. I fixed this by rendering the scene at an offset when Safari is detected, but this leaves an empty (black) bar at the bottom of the display.

Instead of fixing this bug in Tiger, the bug got worse. Unfortunately there is not much more I can do in SPi-V than to step back to a less efficient way of rendering the scene if Tiger is detected. As a result, the scene now renders at the correct screen position, but at significantly lower performance.

I am looking for work to feature in a 3rd party gallery.

Have you created something cool in SPi-V and would like to show it off? Done a neat tour based on one of the sample downloads? Leave a comment, including a link!

The spotter application is a small utility to determine view angles and/or locations for hotspots. It is a minor variation on the normal standalone viewer, but it includes a line showing the current view (pan, tilt, field of view).

Available for Windows and OS X.

The newly uploaded SPi-V application for OS X now uses a safer way to distribute the application. People with OS 10.2 or with certain versions of Stuffit Expander Deluxe installed had problems expanding zip archives with applications in them from the downloads page.

The only caveat is that you have to separately un-hqx the SPi-V engine application. If you are still having trouble opening the archive and/or launching the application, please let me know.

A new version of the SPi-V standalone application is available from the downloads section.
This version adds support for (8 bit, RGB) TIF and Photoshop files.

One of the cooler applications of the new version of the standalone viewers is to launch it from inside Photoshop. When editing equirectangular images it is often hard to spot those last few stitching glitches. Using the new SPi-V standalone viewer, you can directly view you latest edits in the panorama inside a panorama view.

See this updated article ('Launching SPi-V from Photoshop') for more details.

The Quicktime parser script has been updated to cache its XML output. This greatly reduces the server load on subsequent hits on the same quicktime file. It also allows you to easily alter the XML file output and add SPi-V specific features such as those provided by scriptlets

It was only a small step from the cubic display in the last post to this: A fully interactive 360 degree cylindrical viewer. Panning horizontally is surprisingly non-spectacular, but if you tilt up or down the view gets quite mind-boggling (if not stomach churning ;-)

The syntax to use this viewer is suspiciously similar to the cubed viewer, ie:
www.fieldofview.nl/spv/showcubed.php?file=http://[domain]/[path to your content]

Some cool samples from the fullscreen gallery: