Panorama activity

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

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The XO happens to be perfect for shooting stitched panoramic photographs, due to
the swivel design.  I tested it out in the OLPCHQ lobby. Then, I wrote a simple
panorama stitcher in 50 lines of Python.  It runs in 3.4 seconds on my Core Duo,
producing this output:

http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~bmschwar/lobby_ugly.jpg

The results aren't too bad.  I also tried stitching this scene with Hugin, the
most powerful panorama stitcher I know of.  Hugin required significant user
intervention and half an hour of computing time, producing this output:

http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~bmschwar/lobby_pretty.jpg

This scene is unusually difficult because of the huge indoor-outdoor contrast.
Given this positive result, I would like to work on a panorama-making activity,
possibly inside Capture.  I know that at age 10, I loved making panoramas out of
photographs.  Panoramas provide an immersive way for children to communicate
their environments to each other and to the world.

- --Ben Schwartz
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