Pangea Software today announced the release of PanoPreviewer 2.0, the latest version of its popular PanoPreviewer plug-in for Photoshop. Version 2.0 is now a Universal Binary application and compatible with Photoshop CS2 and CS3. PanoPreviewer allows panoramic photographers to instantly preview their equirectangular images as VR panoramas (an “equirectangular” image is a 360 degree panorama that has been unwrapped into a 2D image — like a map of the Earth unwrapped into a poster). Normally when editing an equirectangular image the photographer is constantly exporting the file and then manually loading it into an external viewer, but with PanoPreviewer the tedium of that process has been completely eliminated. PanoPreviewer does all of its rendering using hardware accelerated OpenGL. The result is a VR panorama that is fast and smooth even when displayed full-screen. PanoPreviewer 2.0 is priced at US$19.95.
