by Sandra Mexa | Oct 21, 2016 | Projects
In late 2015, we did this project for The ANZAC Memorial, Hyde Park Sydney. RSL requested a Gigapixel from the Memorial’s Great Dome of Stars, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the First World War. In this part of the Memorial, we can find a domed ceiling covered in tiny golden stars. The ceiling of the Hall of Memory is 26 metres high. It is covered with 120,000 stars. The stars are a symbolic representation of the men and women from New South Wales who embarked for overseas service during the Great War: ‘this Golden Galaxy symbolises all those men and women from New South Wales who served in the war – one star for every man or woman who heard the call – a constellation of honour and memory totalling 120,000. These stars, placed high above the eye of the spectator and lighted by the amber glass of the great windows, makes of the interior of the Hall a place of sacred memories.‘ This project is part of a public fundraising campaign which replicated an original campaign that allowed the building finalization, back in 1934. The idea is to sell the Stars in a 360° photograph of the dome. Purchasers are able to tag their star and leave a message in memory of a veteran in this online Constellation of Honour and Memory. 81 years later, the funds raised will be used to new interpretive and education programs, heritage conservation and exhibition content, so that the Memorial is able to continue to play its vital role in telling the stories and sharing the history of NSW’s involvement in...
by Sandra Mexa | Aug 10, 2016 | Projects
An amazing VR project we produced with the wonderful Kym Basoka at Compassion Australia is packaged up by Kym and her team, and heading out to their field offices. The 7 minute story, set in Thailand isn’t available publicly yet, we can’t wait to show it to you, but you’ll have to wait I’m...
by Sandra Mexa | Apr 20, 2016 | Projects, News
Today we’re launching the beta of our Samsung GearVR app, Play VR. http://www.panedia.com/playvr It’s an app we’ve developed specifically for VR demos at shows and for clients, while it also has ‘advanced’ features for viewing our own content. (or yours) We’ve done over 1,000 VR demo’s and have been frustrated at the limitations of the Oculus 360video player, and how slow it is to access content via the Oculus store. (3-4 clicks before you get to the content.) Play VR has various modes you can set depending on requirements: 1. LOOP MODE: Swipe up and select LOOP MODE. Then select the video to loop. Now the same video will play endlessly, while the touchpad controls are disabled. Clients will no longer change video/pause or otherwise mess up the demo when putting on the GearVR. To restart the video any time, just click the ‘back’ button. 2. DEMO MODE: Like Loop mode, it disables controls, but only while the video is playing. When the video finishes the user can select another video. 3. ADVANCED MODE (Default): Here we’ve added amazing tools no one has ever conceived like… Fast Forward, Rewind. (All Patented of course wink emoticon) Swipe forward to Fast Forward, Swipe back to rewind. Swipe up to bring up a menu when playing a video. Access chapter points and view description, author etc. We’ve built this app specifically for our own needs as Professional VR producers, if you find it useful too, all the better. We don’t have the app on the Oculus Store yet, so we need to add your Phone ID to the Beta app in order...
by Aaron Spence | Mar 8, 2016 | Projects, News
10 years ago the first iPhone was more than a year away. Google Street View had well over a year until launch. Facebook wouldn’t become open for another 6 months. Palmer Luckey the founder of Oculus was 13 years old and VR as a head mounted modern technology was almost a decade from realisation. But 10 years ago, specifically at 5:22pm on March 8th 2006 a very important thing was happening at Panedia. It’s the day I shot the very first panorama (above) in what was to become our Panorama Production System. It’s around the time Michelle (my wife) and I decided to risk everything we had on VR and it’s close to the day Panedia was registered as a company. So it’s the day we celebrate 10 amazing years of Panedia. 10 years ago I was starting on a new journey. Sure I had been shooting panoramas for 6+ years at the time, but not as my only source of income. From that day onwards I was dedicated only to VR. Not only dedicated but prepared to spend every dollar I had and more, building a company and system to produce VR better and faster than ever before, and importantly with GPS data for online mapping. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars and years later, we have what I regard as the best professional panorama system there is. With our systems we have become the number one contributor to Google Maps worldwide. In fact just today we received an email from Google congratulating us on 175 million views of our VR content on Google Maps. From our systems...
by Sandra Mexa | Dec 7, 2015 | Projects
The US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting another strong El Niño and has now announced the third global bleaching event. This a new phenomenon is caused by ocean warming – corals are unable to cope with today’s prolonged peaks in temperatures. They simply haven’t been able to adapt to the higher base temperatures of the ocean. Although reefs represent less than 0.1 percent of the world’s ocean floor, they help support approximately 25 percent of all marine species. Panedia has been partnering with XL Catlin Seaview Survey for several years producing a wide imagery of the oceans worldwide and is now able to compare before and after images on several locations. The change is quite impressive and frightening. wwww.globalcoralbleaching.org...
by Sandra Mexa | Sep 24, 2015 | Projects
The Anzac Memorial was created by the people of New South Wales as a place to remember the impact of the Great War (1914 – 1918). Although the Memorial did not open until 1934 the need for the Memorial was recognised as soon as the casualty figures from the 1915 Gallipoli campaign became public knowledge. Planning for a Memorial of some kind began with the establishment of a fund on the first anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli in 1916. As Australia marks the 100th anniversary of the Great War, the Anzac Memorial Centenary Project will see the new water feature and education and interpretation facilities added beneath the Memorial. As part of that project is the online tour that we have produced. www.anzacmemorial.nsw.gov.au...
by Sandra Mexa | Jan 30, 2015 | Projects
Dr Pim Bongaerts of The University of Queensland heads up the Deep Reef Science for the Catlin Seaview Survey. Very little is known about these deep reefs (aka the mesophotic zone), which can extend to depths over 100m+ beneath the ocean surface, but still harbour light-dependent coral communities. Using custom breathing gases and specialised equipment, Dr Bongaerts and fellow mesophotic scientists from the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences and the California Academy of Sciences reveal this hidden world of the “twilight...
by Sandra Mexa | Sep 6, 2014 | Projects
We just have returned from New Zealand where we could experience the most beautiful sights and lovely good weather for photography. This is just a pick of those pictures, with some interior images of a peculiar restaurant in Queenstown. The rest will be published later on, with all exterior images included. Panedia Google...
by Sandra Mexa | Jul 10, 2014 | Projects
We surveyed the world-famous Sydney Harbour in March 2014, the waters around the entrance to the harbour (North and South Heads) are favourite sites with local scuba divers (and local marine life). In these panoramas you can notice perfectly round holes in the rock where the black sea urchins have burrowed in and made their...
by Sandra Mexa | Jun 27, 2014 | Projects
In March 2014 Catlin Seaview Survey partnered with the Sydney Institute of Marine Science to survey some key Sydney Harbour and coastal areas. Pictured here is our support scooter passing the kelp and urchin covered rocks off Ben Buckler Point at the famous Bondi Beach. This is a favourite dive site for local scuba divers and...
by Sandra Mexa | Jun 15, 2014 | Projects
The largest barrier reef in the northern hemisphere, UNESCO added this site to the World Heritage in danger list in 2009. The system illustrates a classic example of reef types through fringing, barrier and atoll, and the regions seven sites provide a significant habitat for threatened species. This particular dive features Half Moon Cay, at the southern end of Lighthouse Reef Atoll. Image collect by Catlin Seaview Survey. Can be seen here in Catlin Seaview...
by Sandra Mexa | May 13, 2014 | Projects
Cairns Mangrove Boardwalk, like Coombabbah Mangrove, is a great walk to get in touch with nature and specially good for bird watching. This tour now posted on Google Views was part of a scientific project with our partners University of Queensland for mangrove study and monitoring. Panedia Google Street...
by Panedia Team | Jan 9, 2014 | Projects
Our specialist underwater partners were in Monaco, shooting virtual tours of the underwater coastline late in 2013. This shot is outside the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco… appropriately taken in the ocean, showing views of the Museum that 99.9999% of people will never see. This panorama along with a series of others was then made into a virtual tour to show on a Liquid Galaxy system inside the Museum. Typically we use a special rig to shoot these over/under images… but this time Christophe just popped the SVII cameras 1/2 way out of the water and we were able to produce a good...
by Panedia Team | Oct 25, 2013 | Projects
We recently shot the new $1.7 Billion Dollar Gold Coast University Hospital. They’re working on a new website which will include the virtual tour so we can’t show much at present. The panorama above is one of the beautiful indoor open areas that populate the enormous facility. It’s a truly stunning place, where the entrance has an 8 storey atrium, complete with finishes and scale that wouldn’t be out of place in a 6 star hotel. I look forward to showing all the panoramas when the client publishes...
by Aaron Spence | Sep 23, 2013 | Projects
Today the largest project we’ve ever produced launched via a Google Hangout with various partners in 2 locations… New York and Bermuda. http://globalreefrecord.org The Catlin Global Reef Record (CGRR) is so much more than the work we usually do of producing interactive media. It’s a complete system of content and data acquisition from the underwater cameras of SVII, through many stages of data processing and content stitching to the finished scientific website. Completing the project has involved developing offline processing systems for the data and content collected underwater, which marry with the online database, mapping and panorama playback systems of the CGRR website. In short… extremely difficult stuff, that had to work at scale in order to produce over 40,000 high resolution panoramas = 30+ Terrabytes of data, which compressed down to 400 Gigabytes for the website. Of course the website had to not only work well (and it does), it had to be fast. We presently use the Akamai CDN for our Panedia content… but with over 40,000 panoramas, each containing 40+ pieces of content, there’s no way a CDN would cache anything of value for the local user. So we built our own CDN of sorts. The CGRR system uploads the content to Amazon S3 (USA), then replicates it to various S3 locations around the world. When the user enters the site, we check their location and serve content from the nearest S3 facility containing our data. Speed tests confirm the content is vastly quicker in various locations, over a traditional CDN or single S3 location. So now the site is live, we start on the next...
by Aaron Spence | Sep 10, 2013 | Projects
Top 20 Winners Video. (13mins w/music) Once again I was asked to judge interactive 360 panoramas (virtual tours) for the Epson International Pano Awards. As usual I thoroughly enjoyed the process, wishing only for more time to luxuriate in the outstanding work. As with previous years we also produced the top 20 video for show on the Epson stand at the PMA Photo Exhibition. To do this we use tools built way back in 2006, which work with After Effects, allowing us to produce HD and higher rez clean video output from...
by Panedia Team | Jun 24, 2013 | Projects
We love to help friends out where we can… so when ‘Underwater Earth’ our Catlin Seaview Survey partners needed a simple new website, we came to the party and put a little something together for them. In addition to the slick sideways scrolling site, sitting over our favourite over/under panorama, we put together a short virtual tour with some of the best work we’ve done together to date. In the virtual tour above you’ll see Galapagos SeaLions, Lady Elliot Island, Manta Rays, Sharks, Giant Potato Cod, Coral Reefs… you know… all the good stuff. Underwater Earth New...
by Aaron Spence | Apr 28, 2013 | Projects
We recently had the great pleasure of spending time on the road shooting the wonders of the Queensland Coast from Bundaberg to Yeppoon, 2 island of the Great Barrier Reef – Great Keppel Island and Lady Musgrave Island, and 500km inland.. Canarvon Gorge. All stunning landscapes, all beautiful places, all areas I’d like to return to and spend some leisurely time. Above you’ll find a quick taste of the areas we shot over 7...
by Aaron Spence | Feb 25, 2013 | Projects
I spent a couple of weeks in the Raja Ampat region of Indonesia with UWE (Underwater Earth) our Catlin Seaview Survey partners. We were there to appear in an IMAX 3D Underwater documentary about the region… well they were, I was there to make sure everything worked. In addition we took the time to survey some of the astounding coral in the region and visit with the local owners and care takers of the reef. It was an amazing trip, check it out above. Imax behind the scenes from Krabi Imaging on...
by Aaron Spence | Feb 1, 2013 | Projects
I’ve had the privilege of staying at and photographing the wonderful facilities and region of O’Reillys Rainforst Retreat a number of times now. This is my 3rd shoot with them over the past couple of years, this time to cover some of their new facilities. The family has accompanied me on most of the trips, and truly loved every minute. At least a couple of times per year the kids ask if I can do some more work there so we can stay...
