Neil's News

iPIX

3 April 2003

After more than two years of construction, the new shopping centre finally opened in the middle of Inverness. Unfortunately it appears to be useless; no Radio Shack, Maplin or anything else that will sell a resistor. Just more clothing stores as far as the eye can see.

However, it provided an opportunity to test our company's new toy, an iPIX camera kit. It features an impressive 180° fisheye lens. Here's the left hemisphere and here is the right hemisphere. Stitch the two halves together and you get this single sphere (you may need to download the plug-in to view it). Due to draconian licensing by iPIX, it costs $25 to save a single iPIX sphere properly. So the demo on this page is watermarked, and will expire in 30 days.

It's really fun working with a 180° lens. For one thing, people behave naturally as long as you don't point it directly at them: they instinctively know how wide a camera's field of vision is and don't have a clue that they're in your frame. Another thing is that it can see straight up and straight down, so you will always get the tripod in the shot.

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