360 Panorama for iPhone Review

Our rating:

By: Occipital, LLC

Version #: 3.1

Date Released:

Developer: By Occipital

Price: $0.99

User Rating:

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Panoramic apps have been a popular, but troubling genre of apps for the iPhone. The computing power and motion sensors in the iPhone seems to be made for easy panoramic creations, and yet most panoramic apps struggle to create quality images. Occipital software has decided that with the iPhone 4’s new gyroscope would give it the advantage it needed.

360 Panoramic aim to make panoramic images easy. When you start the app you have a wire mesh that will be your canvas. As you move your phone around it tracks your movement and correlates that will an area of the mesh. When you are ready to capture you tap the capture button and begin to move slowly around as it captures the images. There is a gauge on top that shows you if you are moving too fast for the lighting conditions. The less light you have the slower you have to move to get clear images. capture can be done in both portrait and landscape orientation, but the controls will not rotate. for the best capture, I found that linear movements work best and the seems between images look more seamless with more distant subjects.

What you have finished capturing you photo, it moves to the viewer where you can scroll around your picture by moving the iPhone physically, or you can swipe with your finger on the screen. The usual pinch and zoom for images apply. If everything looks good, you have the option to save the image out to your photos as a flat image, email the image as a .360 file, or flat image, and finally to share on the 360 Panoramic site. One nice feature was that images saved out to the iPhone’s photos can be reimported without any noticeable change. The same could be said of the emailed copies. If your recipient has the 360 Panoramic app on their iPhone, then you can email the .360 file to them and it will immediately bring it right into their app. For sharing with others the hosting on Occipital’s site is great. It has a built in web viewer that lets you pan over the images from any web browser.

Computer generated panoramas are still not comparable to hand made images, but with the exceptional movement tracking of the iPhone, and its quality camera, 360 Panoramic does a decent job of creating great panoramic images that can really give your viewers a sense of your location and what is around. The best part is that at $.99, 360 Panoramic is a great value for your money.

We rate this app 4 out of 5 stars.