I see your point if that’s what you want to use, but I’ve been doing panos for years using 40 and 50mm lenses on normal dSLRs. Personally, I can’t stand the ultra-distorted effect from pano’d fishies and prefer a more relaxed perspective.

I had the same problem when I attempted to download with Firefox. I then viewed the page using IE addon for FireFox and was able to download with on problem.
The page I used is:
http: // research.microsoft.com / ivm/ ice.html

Any one else have this problem? Is there a new link or is MS just pulling the product?

Come on, of course I use PTGui’s control point editor — if it’s inevitable. But if you know how to shoot panoramas with a good and reliable setup (good camera system, accurate NPP-adapter and so on), you will need manual control point interaction in say maybe 5 percent of your projects (and still mostly only for horizon straitening).

About the fisheye issue: Only Gigapixel-people will use lenses other then either ultra-wide or, mostly, fisheyes to produce panoramas. So at least IMHO any software that fails fisheye support is more a toy than a tool.

I don’t think that ICE works with fisheye. So if that is the only way you and all people who make their living on panoramas shoot then I guess that you are correct – this program will not meet your needs.

If you aren’t using the control point editor in PTGui, then what “high-level manipulation” are you using?

Thanks for your reply and sorry for being a little inacurate: I know your site is about freeware only and that’s exactly what I love it for! I just thought you cannot leave PTGui out of panorama software like you could not leave Photoshop out when talking about pixel based graphic programs. Thanks for your efforts to run this site!

@ anonymous:
Like I said, I do not use Hugin any longer as I do my stuff with PTGui. But I’ve used Hugin some years, and if you go a little deeper into the facts you’ll easily find out that of course it’s absolutely not necessary to pick your control points by hand (using Autopano, Autopano SIFT, Autopano-SIFT-C, Pablos Pearl-Script or one of the many other possibilities).

I did several tests with ICE, feeding it with fisheye sources, and despite the fact that it takes about ten (!) times longer to look for control points, compared to PTGui or about half the time longer than Hugin when I used it the last time, the results were just wavy, wrongly stitched and all in all horrible. Maybe it has problems with fisheye images, but if that’s the case you’ll probably understand why I think it’s either not ready for primetime or nothing for people that make their living with panoramas.

can u explain?

“a serious panoramist will have no joy using ICE”

Have you actually tried the program? I’m not sure that your characterization is correct. I could make an argument that Hugin is closer to MS Paint. Just like you can paint every pixel in Paint, Hugin lets you spend hours setting control points. Is that “joy”. Not for me. I’d love to see you post a few examples of projects where ICE was inadequate and Hugin shined.

As for paid software.. it is outside the scope of what I write about or recommend in this site.

People that are serious with stitching panoramas (like me — I live from it) won’t ever use something like ICE due to it’s low level of user manipulation possibilities. Hugin is an impressive program that keeps getting better (and whose user base and coders developed most of the functionality first that other’s later copied). It’s by far the better program, compared with ICE, regarding the possibilities it offers. But if you want something really reliable, you’d want to go for PTGui. It’s not free, but like a photographer would rather use Photoshop than MS Paint, a serious panoramist will have no joy using ICE.