Kevin Gross, the mind behind Panogaea, has just released an App for the mac that performs sophisticated panoramic image manipulation. His App, available here, gives you control to manipulate and distort your panoramas to create fantastic new images.
It's fast image processing is enabled by a combination of leveraging the computational power of the computers graphics card and by employing multithreaded algorithms. This allows Panogaea to enable realtime manipulation of large panoramic images and the interface lets you cascade an arbitrary number of distortion mappings together while you see the results live as you interactively vary their parameters.
Here's an example of what Panogaea can produce:
This is a picture of Walter, who we met on our trip through Africa, standing on a rock ledge at the Mowani Lodge in Namibia watching the sunset.
This image above was generated from this equirectangular image I built for a presentation in a Panorama viewer:
File dimensions 6,000 x 3,000 pixels
Here's a quick screenview of how fast it is to manipulate an image:
Note: you don't have to have panoramic images, the app will work with any images.
