This post was prompted by reading a post elsewhere from someone who wanted explore scores to be removed. I’d like to argue for an increase in the range of viewing options not a reduction. For a long time I have thought that there are lots of different ways of viewing gigapans – of which “view by explore score” is one – but we have only ever had a limited range of options.

I note that we now have galleries and gigapan “detail pages” now have three thumbnails alongside the main image to encourage viewers to look at other gigapans, but when I consider the large number of ways gigapans could be displayed I think the current set of choices is weak, really weak. (That some of the ways we do have don’t even work is imo pathetic; i.e. worthy of disdain and very sad.) Some of you will know I have made some experimental tools for viewing gigapans. My favourite is one that shows the user a complete screenful of randomly-chosen images. I like this because I get to see images that I wouldn’t have chosen to look at but are in fact, now that they have been put in front of me, astonishing or beautiful or just plain crazy or … I also like the fact that the tool shows me lots of gigapans at once.

I’m wondering how other people would like to be able to choose to display gigapans. Maybe if there is enough support for one particular idea, gigapan.com might implement it.

Hello Kilgore661

I wholeheartedly agree that having lots of ways to find the Gigapans is paramount. I really like your tools like the random viewer and map view.

That Gigapan does not have the functionality that they offer even working is really sad.

What would be ally nice is if there could be a ‘sandbox’, where we could fix the problems and develop the features needed while hosting the fixes on the Gigapan servers (as there are limitations to using our own servers to do the task due to security restrictions in the JavaScript engines and Flash, there are major ‘same origin’ policy issues.)

If there could be a way to open up the Gigapan servers to some user generated code, and allow users to try it out, I believe that us users could do all the needed work easily and Gigapan could benefit tremendously with the user generated upgrades. How about letting some interested power users have subdirectories on the server to host some php code and read access to the main database and write access to our own tables. We could come up with our own viewing and recommendation logic and users could try it out. I would happily sign non-disclosure agreement as well as allow for circuit breakers to prevent any unruly code from hogging resources.

For example, I have experimental JavaScript code that can make three dimensional anaglyph Gigapans on the fly within the users browser, but I can not release it into the wild due to same origin policy issues for JavaScript to access the image tile data to create the anaglyph tinting in the browser. Currently I have to have an intermediary proxy server do the tile tinting so that there is not cross origin data issues, but this method is very server intensive so does not scale, whereas if it we were just supplying code to a users browser, it would be no server load at all and would scale perfectly.

The next huge issue is mobile. I personally no longer wish to use a desktop computer to look at Gigapans, I far prefer the Retina screen of an IPad or the new Kindle or Nook, but none of these devices are properly supported by Gigapan. There is an iOS Gigapan ap, but it does not support retina resolution and Flash on Android is terrible in regards to pinch to zoom not existing in browser Flash. That is why I created http://www.3d-360.com/ipan – Strangely it is hardly used by anyone and without anyone providing feedback as to why not or suggestions.

Concerning the Explore Score, I do not want explore score to go away, I just want there to not be a nonfunctional system.

I do find it curious how few people have anything to say on these forums however, and also curious why the number of Gigapans posted does not grow a bit faster, there seems to be a fair bit of user fatigue and churn. The top ten most prolific Gigapanners still have half the pixels posted. (Ron…;).

I truly encourage everyone to post thoughts and ideas more on these forums, experiment more, and to comment and tag each others Gigapans more. The site seems to heavy on pixels, lite on human interaction. I am going outside now to look at the real world, go skiing and scuba diving and hang out with friends and laugh lots and donate free time to worthy environmental causes like the prevention of shark finning.

Cheers

Jason

I sincerely hope Gigapan is listening to Kilgore and Jason’s comments. It’s very telling when people outside the organization are writing their own code to improve the viewer’s experience. Gigapan should have you guys as consultants!
I am not savvy in computer programming, but it seems to me it would be simple to weight the explore code according to a handful of inputs: number of views, time spent per view, amount of zoom used per view, diversity of links to the page, gigapan size, diversity of snapshot authors, whether it has been geolocated, etc. Even if it defaulted back to the old algorithm which at least worked that would be step in the right direction.
Or maybe Gigapan could survey their members to see what they want included in the explore score.
Hope the explore score stalemate does not drag too much longer…

Jason, I think your idea about allowing some users to use the gigapan servers directly is an excellent one. Can you contact me privately please? I have tried what I thought was your email address and private messaging but not received a reply.

Glen, perhaps you are not aware of this, but when gigapan.com was the academic project gigapan.org, the people running the project explicitly said “we like that you have these ideas but don’t want to host them” which is why some of us started doing our own thing. (In defence of gigapan.org, their reasoning was that resources were limited and they wanted to spend them on their own ideas. And they provided the tools for people to do their own thing.)

I imagine Jason’s remark about the top ten most prolific gigapanners (or uploaders to gigapan.com at any rate) was made partly in jest, but it points to a serious issue viz the number of people that actually have any interest in gigapans. It occurs to me that the reason why there is apparently little use of Jason’s excellent tools and the stuff I have written, and the reason why gigapan.com don’t dedicate more resources to problems like explore scores is that, sadly, there simply aren’t many people who are that interested in what we do.

Jason, I get an “Error On Page” message if I try to view any of the panos on http://www.3d-360.com/ipan.

Hi Tom,

Had some server issues yesterday, but all should be cleared up. I do not get any errors, can you please send me an email with any errors if they continue. I have been working hard behind the scenes to improves this and hope to bring forth some exciting new additions in the months ahead. http://www.3d-360.com/ipan for viewing on any device with Retina quality, http://www.3d-360.com for 3D panoramas, and http://www.3d-360.com/440 for virtual reality views (replace the 440 with your favorite gigapan id)

Thanks

Jason

Clicking any of the thumbnails now opens a blank page without any error message. MSE 8 on Windows 7.

I see that the last 11 of my GigaPans have explore scores of exactly 1. What’s up with that?

Not certain, but I’d say they implemented a new/modified algorithm late last week. I know one of my suggestions in the past was that making the minimum Explore Score 1 rather than zero would be somewhat less daunting for those who are new to GigaPanning.

What will be genuinely interesting is to see how frequently these new Explore Scores are updated. If they don’t update at least daily I suspect they’ll be as non-functional as the old ones. In any case, I’d still like to see a more open conversation between developers and (power) users about statistics on the site – I think there’s still a lot more they could be doing to make the site more engaging.

Hello Everyone:

Gigapan’s Explore Score – a complex measure of how explored a gigapan is by others – went offline last fall. Gigapan engineers have fixed it and turned it back on in early February. The Explore Score is calculated using numerous weighted variables. Part of the calculation is a measure of the intensity of viewing, that is, how new a gigapan is relative to how many people are viewing it and, particularly, interacting with it. Interaction is weighted more heavily than page views alone. Newly uploaded gigapan images may rank initially higher on this measure than older gigapans because of their newness.

Gigapan is in the process of back-populating Explore Score values for gigapan images uploaded and explored through fall 2012 to work to correct the inequality caused while the Score was not calculating.

Thanks for your patience!

Excellent news!

I am not sure if anyone else has noticed this but all my explore scores have been reset or set to 1. It doesn’t really bother me but is just curious.