Amazing it took so long really. I did some photography work with them in the late 90s in return for kit and free software/keys/etc. We also made some 360 degree video in 2000 (I need to dig that out sometime as it was quite cool)
They could have been great if they’d not sought to try and charge to “develop” every-single-photo, which was insane, very annoying and throttled their business – and they harshly protected their “patent” on the stitching of 2 fish-eye photos (which was just laughable by anyone with a maths background – really. nonsense). I tried, but failed, to convince them to change… money getting in the way of making money again.
Just as bad was the cash-burn, I looked at their annual accounts a few times and it was clearly a dot-com play that lucked out for a bit too long and took a while to burn out.
Oddly, the Ipix site seems unaffected and doesn’t even mention the news… although in other news, it looks like the controversy is continuing around their patents.
There are plenty of open-source solutions out there, for example, the great (£40) PTGui
