Historical:SoC2007 application

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Organization

We are used to collaborate across timezones and cultures. For the Google Summer of Code we gave ourself a more formal project organization structure.

Steering Committee

To offer the students and mentors the best chances of success, we have constituted a varied Steering Committee representing the wider interests around the code. Students and mentors will be required to produce regular progress reports. The Steering Committee will have an advisory role to them, bringing in years of disparate experience and relevant industry contacts.

G. Donald Bain

bio

Aldo Hoeben

Aldo Hoeben has been involved in panoramic photography since 1996. Over the years, he deployed several different viewing technologies, discovering the merits and limitations of each technology. With a steady development of mainstream computer graphics hardware and the arrival of broadband internet, the time to initiate new innovations in the field of panoramic imaging has come.

This is why Aldo started to develop the SPi-V engine; a hardware accelerated panorama viewing engine, based on Macromedia's acclaimed Shockwave technology. When SPi-V 1.0 was released in 2004, it was the first publically available, hardware accelerated panorama viewer, running on both Windows and Mac OS platforms. For more information about fieldOfView or the SPi-V engine, please visit the fieldOfView website.

In 2006, Aldo joined the IVRPA Board of Directors and headed the team that created the new IVRPA community website, based on the open source Drupal CMS.

Trained as an industrial designer, Aldo's expertise lies in prototyping interactions. From 2000 - 2005, he taught courses on interaction design to Delft University of Technology design students.

Erik Krause

bio

Luca N. Vascon

A digital photographer since the eighties and a panoramic photographer since 1990, Dr. Luca N. Vascon is a teaching assistant and superintendent of the Multimedia Laboratory Magazzino7 at the Design and Arts faculty of IUAV University of Venice, Italy.

Educated in Industrial Design at the IUAV University of Venice, Luca has been photographing architecture, interiors and since 1999 has been working on immersive photography and digital panoramas.

Since 2003 he cooperates to plan and execute FSE courses at the Design and Arts faculty of IUAV University of Venice where he teaches the European Social Fund course of Photography, Digital Photography, Panoramic Photography - "Immersive Imaging" and Macromedia Flash for cartoons.

Since 2004 he also design panorama and VR-object tools for Agnos S.r.L., a leading European manufacturer of panorama hardware.

In 2005 Luca organized and managed the PanoTools Meeting in Venice, a yearly international Immersive Imaging congress.

In 2006 he was visiting professor at the Politecnico di Milano in Como, teaching Digital Panoramas and Immersive Imaging.

He collaborated as an advisor on the MIT project "History Unwired".

Moreover he collaborates as beta tester, translator and graphic designer for commercial and open source panorama related software (Pano2QTVR, Fma, PTgui, PTmac and more) and is committed to the diffusion of open source software and open content culture.

Works 2005/2006

Panoramic mapping of Gran Teatro La Fenice - Venice
Panoramic mapping of Palazzo Franchetti, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti - Venice
Panoramic mapping of Casa del Mantegna - Mantova
With Antonio Garbasso, panoramic mapping of the Arsenale - Venice

Coordinators

Yuval Levy

Born in Israel, raised in Switzerland and currently living in Canada, Yuval's life has been an exciting journey through multiple cultures. Schooled in Italian in the sunny part of Switzerland, he moved to Zurich to attend university in German and followed his girlfriend (turned wife) to Paris. Fluent in Italian, German, French, English and Hebrew, he can get along in a few more languages too.

Like his life path, his career has been a stimulating passage through various disciplines. Educated as an MBA, trained as a CFA he never really fitted into any one mold. Even before university he engaged in commercial computer programming at the age of 14. While working for world class banks, he also had a stint as a dive-master in the Caribbean. Photography has always been a passion.

Twenty percent schooled and eighty percent self taught, Yuval constantly seeks to apply his brain to new knowledge. The request of a Dutch customer for a virtual tour of his hotel got him started on panoramas and virtual reality. That was in late 2003, when Yuval was in between moving from Paris to Québec.

Passion turned into fervor. He embarked on a path of discovery and learning, honed his skills and participated as a VR artist in different forums.

In December 2004 he participated for the first time in the World Wide Panorama and has not missed one edition (four times a year) since. [1]
In May 2005 his submission was accepted into the exclusive collection of Panoramas of World War II Landmarks. [2]
In August 2006 his work was published by the prestigious industry magazine VRmag.

[3]

Yuval is involved in VR not only artistically, but also technically. His Brocap tool was one of the first to detect available VR technology in the browser and display accordingly. In 2006 he set up a business that offers standardized real estate tours. In that context, his business was chosen by Remax-Québec to photograph the Maison Opération Enfant Soleil 2006 - the first prize of a yearly lottery benefiting children in hospitals.

Mentors

Our mentors all have experience of mentoring students in an academic environment.

Pablo d'Angelo

bio

Herbert Bay

Herbert Bay received his PhD from ETH Zurich in 2006.

His career is rather unusual: After his apprenticeship as a machine mechanic apprentice, he spent an adventurous two-year period of traveling, jobbing, windsurfing and other funny things. Then he made up his mind and entered the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) with best grades.

His Master studies in Micro-engineering got enriched by an exchange year in Montreal, Canada where he first discovered his interest for Computer Vision. After numerous projects in the field of Computer Graphics and Image Processing, he graduated in 2002.

After his master, he was helping customers to address their critical business challenges for e-learning projects as a Junior Engagement Manager at IBM Switzerland. Day after day, his increasing desire to realize some of his long ignored ideas pushed him further to undertake a PhD at the Computer Vision Lab of ETH Zurich [4] in 2003.

During his PhD Herbert Bay was focusing on image correspondence as well as their applications like 3D reconstruction, object recognition, and image mosaicking. He successfully mentored numerous projects related to these topics. With his new approach of finding point correspondences between images, also known as SURF [5] (Speeded Up Robust Features), he outperformed the state-of-the-art in both speed and performance.

Currently, Herbert Bay is working for his own company focusing on object recognition with mobile phones. Besides Computer Vision, he is fond of photography, sailing, arts and archeology, among many other things.

Daniel M. German

bio

Students

Some volunteers already came forward. Serious recruiting effort will start after the mentoring organization is accepted.

Why are we applying for participation

What do we hope to gain by participating

Did your organization participate in GSoC 2005 or 2006

We did not participate in GSoC in the past and we never applied before.

Who is the administrator

to be defined.

What license does your project use

GPL.

What is the URL for your ideas page

http://wiki.panotools.org/SoC2007_projects

What is the main development mailing list for your organization

http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/panotools-devel

What is the main IRC channel for your organization

do we have any?

Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now

not really.

Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information

to be defined.

Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account Information

Pablo d'Angelo
Daniel M. German
Herbert Bay
any other "senior" developer or academic with mentoring experience around?

What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible

familiarity and experience with the production process of stitched panoramas
knowledge of the universe of code applied to stitched panoramas
experience in mentoring junior coders, possibly from an academic environment
in depth knowledge of user requirements
...

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students

First we try to minimize the risk of disappearing students.

At the recruiting stage we screen the candidates carefully. We can draw on a fairly large pool of students that are users of the panotools and are likely to find candidates from within the ranks of more than 2000 very active users.

We align their interest with ours - for example last year the community arranged for a fund raiser that resulted in the donation of a fish-eye lens to the maintainer of a core software component. This aligned his interests with the interests of the community and helped insure continued support for this kind of lens that is the most widely used in our community. With the help of our steering committee we are likely to initiate similar activities to bind the student to the community.

Depending on the context it might also be possible to structure the work as academic credits to further incentivation.

In the unlikely event that the student disappears, we feel we have a responsibility toward our steering committee, our community, our sponsors. We intend to complete the projects and will do so by looking for a skilled replacement to continue the work. It might take longer than expected, but we will get there. The advancement of hugin and the set of tools around it is driven by user's needs and will relentlessly move forward, even if at a slower pace.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors

The selected mentors are well known and connected in the community. We estimate the risk of a disappearing mentor to be very low. To minimize the impact of such an unlikely event we strive to have two mentors per project that can replace each other seamlessly. In the event that one of the two mentors disappears, recruiting efforts for a backup mentor will start immediately. Our steering committee is well connected and will support the organizer in the efforts to recruit replacement mentors. Our community has already experienced the disappearing of key figures on important projects and survived the test when Helmut Dersch, founding father of the panotools library that is at the core of our community, disappeared.

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program

First of all, we hope to recruit a student from the community. This is a growing and vibrant community. We will make sure that the student has the specialized gear to shoot panoramas and we will make sure they get the bug that all of us have. It's passionating photography. We have already organized a fund raiser to donate a fish-eye lens to one of the project maintainers and we can do this again and again.

What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

We will make sure he or she enjoys the practical aspects of panorama photography. Part of the assignement will be of practical nature: *use* the software to learn it, not just *code*.