PanoPreviewer 2.0 offers VR in Photoshop
updated 01:30 am EDT, Mon March 12, 2007
PanoPreviewer 2.0 released
Pangea Software has released PanoPreviewer plug-in for Photoshop, a new Universal Binary version of the software that allows panoramic photographers to instantly preview their equirectangular images as VR panoramas. Compatible with both Photoshop CS2 and CS3, PanoPreviewer is only available for Mac OS X; an "equirectangular" image, the company says, is a 360 degree panorama that has been unwrapped into a 2D image--much like a map of the Earth unwrapped into a poster. PanoPreviewer streamlines working with VR images by performing all of its rendering using hardware-accelerated OpenGL. The result, the company says, is a VR panorama that is fast and smooth even when displayed full-screen. Previous versions of PanoPreviewer were freeware, but the new 2.0 version costs $20. A demo is available online.
