It has always been annoying that the Microsoft HDView tool relies on silverlight and forces users to install a plugin. Not to mention that I started embedding the panoramas in my page and that led to problems … crashes and lack of 360 deg awareness. So I took another look around at free hosting tools, and gigapan and 360cities emerged as two good options. Gigapan is picky in that they reject panoramas that are too small. They REALLY mean giga. 360cities has some restrictions, but not as severe.
For now, I am moving to 360cities. While my panoramas are not good enough for them to include publicly, they will host them so I can show them here.
My 360cites profile can be found at http://www.360cities.net/profile/richmacd
It turns out that 360cities restricts you to “non-business” images and their rules are hard to understand. If I showed images of a building from the outside, things were ok. If I showed the same building from the inside, it was “advertising for a business”. A bit too arbitrary and restrictive for me, especially as I’m making no money from this.
So now we’re looking elsewhere. I can handle the 50GP (giga-pixel) minimum image size in gigapan (at the very least by enlarging my smaller images, ugh), but they do not do 360 degree “wrap-around” and I really like that feature. Gigapan is fine for scrolling around an image, but you do not feel like you are “inside” the image. OTOH, I like scrolling by clicking and dragging the mouse, and I hate the 360cities mouse scrolling.
I think I’ll give photosynth a try. A bit awkward, as I have to (1) synth with hugin, (2) clean up with gimp, (3) open with photoshop express (I own a copy) so I can use the export plugin (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/39e3bd90-7b2f-4f85-b32f-3a3d5cd04e36/) to get it to photosynth.