Since the sale of RedLaser to eBay, people have been asking what’s next for Occipital. While RedLaser has been in the limelight, the team has been hard at work on our next-generation computer vision application.

Today we’ve launched 360 Panorama (app store: $2.99): realtime panorama creation for your iPhone 4 or 3GS. Gone is the need to stitch together a series of still photographs. With 360, simply pan your phone in any direction and watch as our computer vision system builds a panorama in realtime. Capturing a panorama on your phone has never been easier.

360 Panorama is our first major release since RedLaser, and we’ve surmounted many challenges to make it happen. We’re proud to say there’s simply no other app like it.

Here’s a short video preview of 360 Panorama in action:

Tech Note: The first release of 360 Panorama is optimized to make panorama capture extremely fast and easy so that you can share panoramas very rapidly. As we improve the precision of generated panoramas, we’ll also add options for higher resolution outputs. Current resolution of a 360 degree panorama is 2048 pixels wide (which is still wider than most monitors).

We’ve been getting a lot of requests that look like this:

I love RedLaser, but can you please add my favorite site X to your search results?

Can you send the barcode I scanned to site X for logging?

We thought this might happen, so we embedded a feature in RedLaser 2.2 that lets you search any website by barcode. But until now, we haven’t announced the feature.

RedLaser Custom Apps is now live! After you’ve installed RedLaser, check out this page: redlaser.com/apps (best viewed on an iPhone).

Pre-built popular custom apps

Build your own custom app

Your new custom app!

Try building an app by following the instructions and let us know what you think. We’d also love some suggestions for other sites to add to our “popular” custom apps list.

We’re excited to see what RedLaser Custom Apps get built and used!

By the way if you like RedLaser, we also launched two other iPhone application last week -FoodScanner (partnership with DailyBurn), and Snapture (partnership with SnaptureLabs). All three of these apps are doing well – they’re all in the top 100 paid apps on the App Store and RedLaser is at #2!

******* EDIT *************

We just added the option to convert scanned barcodes to UPC if the site you are searching only supports UPC format.  On the RedLaser Custom Apps page, when building an app, simply check the “Convert to UPC” box, and the app you create will convert to UPC before searching.