Slashdot Mirror
Inside Microsoft's New Digital Photo Project
robyn217 writes "While Microsoft Research plays 'Big Brother' to a young hiker's trip across North America, it breaks new ground in digital photography by combining metadata, like location via GPS, with the image. Its online presence looks impressive as it displays digital photo albums on a map of the world, but it's slow and unwieldy for the most part and may not be better than a standard travelogue site. This week, I took a closer look at the project currently named the World-Wide Media eXchange (WWMX)."
Just point at the picture you'd like to go to, and Microsoft will tell you exactly where it is.
They are the freaking sponsor! You make it sound like some grand conspiracy.
I'm glad microsoft is getting into this kind of thing. National Geographic has been doing a dismal job over the past few months, and there really are not enough players in the game. It's funny, in my experience most geeks really do like the great outdoors, so it seems a proper marriage to me!
Mod +5 Drunk
They have been using embeded data in TIFFs for years in nav. programs that overlayed a map image with altitude and lat/long.
...if a Linux-based solution was doing exactly the same thing terminology like 'big brother' would be nowhere to be found. I find your write-up to be double plus biased.
Once there is a large enough dataset of pictures (and that really is the key to making more then a travelog), I like the idea of combining something like this with a satalite imaging service so you can feel like you are really zooming in.
To me it has the potential to help provide context to the places that you here about on the news or that students are assigned to research. Plus, it's just plain neat!
I currently run a website, TrailRegistry that does exactly this. Actually it does a whole lot more. The general tilt of my site is hiking related, so the pictures are generally of views, shelters, mountains, etc... What I think is more important is sharing of trip data collected by GPS. So for instance, if you hiked an unmarked trail in your area, you could upload the GPS track log to TrailRegistry, and TrailRegistry will create a Topo map (On the fly) for other users to use.
Please check it out, You might find it usefull. Also,I allways love feedback on what I could do better..
Check out TrailRegistry.com, my hiking site, Maps, altitude pr
Hardly.... They sponsored this guy and I think it's great that they are doing so. This is a wonderful project but since it's sponsored by Microsoft it's automatically evil?
Great, lets link to a website that has nothing but photos and thumbnails! Ooh wait, better yet! Let's find one that organizes them dynamically with non-trivial algorithms!!
Are we going for a new slashdotting record or something?
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
While trying to view the microsoft link above I got the following error message:
Still amazingly honest for Microsoft!/p
Of course they couldn't call it WWME - World-Wide Media Exchange
... but I just can't resist plugging hostip.info which attempts to geolocate IP addresses to a latitude / longitude map (and give a nice zoom-in if you're located or (if you're unknown) once you have put in your details...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I have a lot of good ideas for the software, and have already written out a lot of db schema and logic, but I am having a hard time finding high resolution maps which I may use legally, and this was discouraging. Most of the big satellite image companies want an arm and a leg for the right to display their images on your site. Anyone know of a place where I can get at least semi-high resolution satellite maps, like 5m or better, that I'll have the rights to display on my website?
I assume that I would release the software under the GPL without any maps included, but its no fun writing software which nobody can really use unless they purchase satellite imagery!
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
A few years ago an old Jeep buddy of mine mentioned an idea for a web site like this - people could drive around Utah, take pictures, and record the GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken so that others could find the same place for camping/etc.
This just seems to do something of what iPhoto does - attaches some meta-data (in this case, GPS coordinates, time&date, etc) to the file.
I'd say this could be pretty cool, though of course I'd like to see an open standard used and the ability to turn it off. I don't think I mind all cell phones by 2005 having GPS (the ability to save lives could be huge for 9-1-1 services), but I want the capacity to shut the damn thing off so Psycho Boy Jones can't jump me because he didn't like my recipe for spicy sweet mashed potatos.
Side note for those worried about privacy: there was a story I was reading about a service for cell phones in Japan. Suppose your spouse calls and wants a picture of where you are, and instead of working late at the office (like you said you were), you were out at the bar with your friends. This service will forward a picture of your office to them instead of your current location.
With GPS being mandatory in cell phones by 2005 (at least according to the article), you wonder how other people will tap into it? Is this a 9-1-1 services only thing, or is this "add to my GPS" list so people in other phones have your coordinates at all time? (Something that might be a new level of parental control when your teenager goes out with friends for the night....)
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I wonder how can we get MS to pay for other fantasy trips, I would love to get a boat and live on the sea and go diving every day. I would let them take all the pics they want, hell I would even let them test out the new MS scuba computer with me(as long as I get analog backups)
Maybe someday this could be put to use on something like mapquest. Do a search, pop up with a picture of your location, this sure as hell beats any map, when the user can SEE where they are going.
I cant remember how many times i have been stuck guessing which building i have to walk into.
Over the years I've seen many pictures of places I'd like to visit (as I'm sure the rest of you have as well). IMHO, including GPS and other location metadata in a picture is a great idea! Now we'll know exactly where that beautiful water fall we want to visit is rather than just knowing that it's somewhere in Ecuador.
The downside of this is that every tourist with a GPS can find places that are virtually unspoiled by man and end up spoiling them.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Yet the site isn't actually working. Maybe it does suck, maybe it's nothing new, but since it's not actually accessible at the moment, isn't it kind of hard to tell?
It's a Microsoft Research site and obviously they weren't expecting it to be get much traffic. If you doubt Microsoft can set up a site that can handle high volume, everybody click this now:
Microsoft.com
There is at least one professional camera which can embed GPS coordinates in the image data itself, in the form of an additional line in the EXIF tag. It has limitations when you're indoors, I would imagine, but great for most hiking or driving conditions.
This would be immensely popular for real estate agents who need to correlate pictures to addresses all the time.
[
Bill Gates has a private project (Corbis, not affiliated with MS) growing to amass a large collection of photographs. It already does a good business of finding and licensing photos for almost any use. They could be trying to get more for the collection, or to join up in an IP pipeline to benefit both companies.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
I can't wait until GPS technology is small enough and cheap enough to put inside the camera. It'd be great for looking at holiday photos...
"Where the hell was that?"
"Lemme check the map... Oh, that was St Jude's Cathedral."
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
And of course no website running on say, Apache, has ever been slashdotted.
Sheesh.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Server Error in '/' Application.
W orkerRequest wr) +147
.NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.573; ASP.NET
***** Server Too Busy *****
Description:An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details:System.Web.HttpException: Server Too Busy
Source Error:
An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.
Stack Trace:
[HttpException (0x80004005): Server Too Busy] System.Web.HttpRuntime.RejectRequestInternal(Http
Version Information: Microsoft
Version:1.1.4322.573
Screw M$. If you have a GPS and a digital camera, you can make your own site using GPS Photo Link.gpsphotolink I've used it on numerous ocassions and it works like a charm. It uses the time stamp on your digital photos to relate to the nearest waypoint or position in your GPS tracklog to generate GIS data for your photo points. It then creates HTML that links your photos to map graphics of your location.
Check out the sample sites at SAMPLES
if it wasn't before, it sure as heck is now!! yah slashdot!
I was just at a microsoft presentation at my university this week, and the guy was cool enough to demo the lastest build of longhorn. one of the things he showed off was the photo viewer/editor that had facial recognition. it could scan a picture, find peoples faces, let you click and name them, then tell the app to find all other pictures with that person in them. i have been a "mac zealot" for years, and even i must say that it was pretty cool. the guy made a good point that "shouldnt we all be expecting computers to be able to do this kinda stuff by now anyways?" and it's true.
The "Insert Quote Here" line is almost as predictable as inserting an actual quote.
Doesn't the EXIF specification already allow for information such as GPS location to be saved in the tag?
http://www.exif.org/
There also appears to be a propposal for LocationIFD, to further enhance/add to this functionality.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
As a young (19,) long distance hiker (Hiked the entire Appalachian Trail last year) I'm going to be pretty suprised if he can stick anywhere near that schedule. He's planning on going from Pinkham notch to Caratunk in 6 days, which is ~167 miles. That area is on par with the hardest sections of the trail, most thruhikers would be very impressed at averaging 20miles/day through there, yet he's intending to average 28!? In October no less, when there's could easily be a fair amount of snow on the ground. This hike has a lot common with M$, at least as far as big talk goes.
Blue Sky Tomorrows
Wait a minute. "Breaking new ground by... combining metadata with an image"????
Sigh. Astronomers have been doing this since at least 1981 with the FITS Format. See over here for the full story on this venerable and still very much in production format.
I sure hope M$ doesn't try something silly like a patent on this; it seems to me that FITS and the other formats used by the Medical and Geophysical Sciences would provide a wealth of prior art...
-- This
An article that appeared earlied this year in IEEE Pervasive Computing describes the principles of operation.
Diomidis Spinellis - #include "/dev/tty"