“You Gotta See This!”: Awesome concept, but not quite there yet
“You Gotta See This!” (don’t even get me started on the name…) is an app that promises to be “much more or much less” than a panorama app, depending on your taste. Unfortunately the issues with the current version goes beyond taste, if you ask me.
The concept is that you use an iOS device with a camera and a gyroscope (iPhone 4, iTouch 4 or iPad 2) and move it around as if you were showing it the surrounding area. It constantly takes pictures while you do so, and using gyroscope data it pieces these together and make collages. It’s somewhat like panoramas, but at the same time not as you see the borders, it’s everything but completely smooth and it doesn’t require you to line up single photos.
Unfortunately the concept- which is awesome in theory- isn’t very useful in practice. While the iPad 2 camera is rather crappy as it is, this app has other issues as well. I gave it more than one extra chance to impress me, trying it in different environments, different movement speeds, different lighting- but I wasn’t impressed by any of the results. It’s simply not as accurate nor stunning as a proper panorama, and doesn’t really capture the place you’re in well at all. As an example, below is a panorama I made on the iPad using photos from my Canon camera. Below is the corresponding YGST collage from the same spot, same time (note that it has several ways of displaying the result, this is the one I thought was best).
As you can see, the lines from the edges of the individual photos and the misalignment everywhere ruins what is otherwise a nice picture (it was a sunny day so the iPad 2 camera performed better than usual, especially with regards to color representation). This is the absolute best result I got using this app, and even it is below what I’d hoped for (results in darker environments were horrible). Considering the method used to capture everything it’s not awful, but also not ideal. The inability to delete individual photos and manually realign them also subtracts from the experience quite a lot.
The name and purpose of the app suggests that this is something you can easily use to show off places, and maybe it will be that one day. However when the above image is the best result I got from perhaps 20 tests, I can’t recommend the $1.99 app at this time. I do hope they continue working on it as I’m very intrigued by the concept, it just doesn’t hold up to what it promises right now.
