CleVR was a free

panoramic A panorama (formed from Greek πᾶν "all" + ὅραμα "view") is any wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in painting, drawing, photography (panoramic photography), film, seismic images, or 3D modeling. The word ...

photo sharing A photograph (also known as a photo, or more generically referred to as an ''image'' or ''picture'') is an image created by light falling on a photosensitivity, photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor. Th ...

site and photo stitching software. It allowed panoramas to be embedded into other web pages using a

Flash Flash, flashes, or FLASH may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional aliases * The Flash, several DC Comics superheroes with super speed: ** Flash (Jay Garrick) ** Barry Allen ** Wally West, the first Kid Flash and third adult Flash ...

viewer. Panoramas could be displayed with

hotspots Hotspot, Hot Spot or Hot spot may refer to: Places * Hot Spot, Kentucky, a community in the United States Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Hot Spot (comics), a name for the DC Comics character Isaiah Crockett * Hot Spot (Tr ...

— areas in the scene that could be clicked to display other content or to navigate to another scene. This functionality was similar to that provided by Apple's

QuickTime VR QuickTime VR (also known as QTVR) is an image file format developed by Apple Inc. for QuickTime, and discontinued along with QuickTime 7. It allows the creation and viewing of VR photography, photographically captured panoramas, and the viewin ...

, but it allowed images, text and Flash Video ( FLV) video to be displayed within the panorama window.

History

CleVR was originally launched by Clementine in 2000 as a platform for managing

content. The name ''CleVR'' is a contraction of "Clementine Virtual Reality". At first, panoramas could not be posted by the public, so the site contained virtual tours created by Clementine. In October 2006, the web site re-launched in

public beta The software release life cycle is the process of developing, testing, and distributing a software product (e.g., an operating system). It typically consists of several stages, such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the fi ...

as a free site that allowed panoramas to be created by anyone. Much of the content from the previous CleVR site was imported to the new platform. The new site was a complete rewrite of the old code, and was no longer based on QuickTime VR. Instead it used a Flash viewer developed by Clementine to display the panoramas. The new site was officially launched in April 2007. On the current site, the photo stitcher and panorama viewer were developed using

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a mostly discontinuedAlthough it is discontinued by Adobe Inc., for the Chinese market it is developed by Zhongcheng and for the international enterprise market it is developed by Ha ...

, Flex and

AIR An atmosphere () is a layer of gases that envelop an astronomical object, held in place by the gravity of the object. A planet retains an atmosphere when the gravity is great and the temperature of the atmosphere is low. A stellar atmosph ...

. The CleVR site is written in

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...

, and uses

PEAR Pears are fruits produced and consumed around the world, growing on a tree and harvested in late summer into mid-autumn. The pear tree and shrub are a species of genus ''Pyrus'' , in the Family (biology), family Rosaceae, bearing the Pome, po ...

and

ImageMagick ImageMagick, invoked from the command line as magick, is a free and open-source cross-platform software suite for displaying, creating, converting, modifying, and editing raster images. ImageMagick was created by John Cristy in 1987, and it ...

. Images are hosted using

Amazon S3 Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its e-commerc ...

Photo stitcher

CleVR included free

image stitching Image stitching or photo stitching is the process of combining multiple photographic images with overlapping fields of view to produce a segmented panorama or high-resolution image. Commonly performed through the use of computer software, most ap ...

software integrated with the site. This was an

Adobe AIR Adobe AIR (also known as Adobe Integrated Runtime and codenamed Apollo) is a cross-platform runtime system currently developed by Harman International, in collaboration with Adobe Inc., for building desktop applications and mobile application ...

application, created with

Adobe Flex Apache Flex, formerly Adobe Flex, is a software development kit (SDK) for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich web applications based on the Adobe Flash platform. Initially developed by Macromedia and then acquired by Adobe Syste ...

. A Java version was also available. The stitcher generated

cylindrical A cylinder () has traditionally been a Solid geometry, three-dimensional solid, one of the most basic of curvilinear geometric shapes. In elementary geometry, it is considered a Prism (geometry), prism with a circle as its base. A cylinder may ...

panoramas, the only

projection Projection or projections may refer to: Physics * Projection (physics), the action/process of light, heat, or sound reflecting from a surface to another in a different direction * The display of images by a projector Optics, graphics, and carto ...

supported by the CleVR website and software. The stitcher had fewer features than other image stitching software, but was designed to be simple and easy to use. The CleVR photo stitching software could stitch most panoramas without user interaction, but also had support for setting manual control points. While the finished panoramas could be saved to the user's computer as a

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

file, in most cases they would be uploaded to the CleVR website from within the stitcher. Users could also use other stitching software to create panoramas and upload them to CleVR.

Panorama viewer

The most distinguishing feature of CleVR was the way it allowed panoramas to be easily shared and posted on other sites. This was done in a manner similar to services such as

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

, using a

-based viewer that could be embedded in a web page or viewed on the CleVR site. The viewer re-projected the equirectangular panorama to an

orthographic projection Orthographic projection (also orthogonal projection and analemma) is a means of representing Three-dimensional space, three-dimensional objects in Plane (mathematics), two dimensions. Orthographic projection is a form of parallel projection in ...

so that the view appears more natural, without the curved lines otherwise typical for panoramic photographs. It also overlayed the clickable hotspots for navigation and the display of text, images and video.

External links

Official Site
{{DEFAULTSORT:Clevr Free photo stitching software Panorama photography Image-sharing websites Adobe Integrated Runtime platform software Mass media companies of England