by Jason Snell
Creating higher-resolution Vision Pro panoramas
One of my surprisingly favorite features of the Vision Pro is the dynamic display of photographic panoramas. Immersive environments are great, and I love that I can capture stereo video now, but I’ve got an immense library of panoramas that date back to the 1990s.
Yep, that’s right: before the iPhone made it easy to capture panoramas, you used to have to take them the hard way—namely by rotating in a circle and capturing photos every so often. What’s worse, I used to do this with film. I know! I know! But in the late 1990s my parents sold the house I grew up in, and I wanted to capture that place one last time. It was the heyday of QuickTime VR and so I took several rolls of film on my last visit and captured it all.
Developer David Smith gets it. He has detailed how, even now, it’s often superior to capture a bunch of stills and stitch them together rather than use the iPhone’s convenient panorama feature:
Unfortunately right now these panoramas are limited to roughly the width of a standard 12MP capture…
Looking at these iPhone panoramas on a Vision Pro is lovely, they have barely enough resolution to give a good sense of being back at the place where the image was captured. However, after the initial WOW! factor has worn off I started to really notice the fuzziness of the presentation. Presenting an image which is around 3900px tall at a conceptual height of about six feet tall just isn’t enough resolution to really feel immersive.
His solution is mine, too: Take a bunch of photos vertically as you swivel around, then use Photoshop to merge them into a panorama. (The command is File: Automate: Photomerge.) His resulting panoramas were 304 megapixels in size!
If you’re in a spectacular location, it’s totally worth the trouble.