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Photosynth Demo
A couple of days ago Microsoft labs released a demo of their new Photosynth software on the web. Photosynth allows the aggregation of social picture networks (a la Flickr) into a completed image in addition to allowing a level of depth to image browsing previously unavailable. There is also a very impressive video of the demo available.
Then you closed the window about 10 seconds before the demo started. Keep watching.
I don't get the point of that part either, but keep watching. A couple minutes into it he moves on to the real meat of the demo, and it's pretty astonishing. I won't spoil it except to say that if I'd seen it in a sci-fi movie I'd probably have dismissed it as very cool-looking but totally unrealistic.
All those next-stage, new-wave, super-hyped ideas that generated enough excitement to get a survivable user-base just kind of passed me by, because they only ever seemed to be minor amplifications of what we already had. But this... this is something totally new. And utterly, utterly incredible!
I'm so excited by this it's making me feel sick! TECHNOLOGY! INTERWEB! I take it all back - forgive me for my lack of faith! I LOVE YOU!
And by the way, that "content only limited by how many pixels are on the screen" idea has been a long time coming, and I'm deeply happy that someone's solved it. I could never understand why we use raster-imaging for computer games because it's a squillion times quicker than ray-tracing, but nobody had applied the same idea to other applications. Now I feel justified in wondering, and I'm so pleased with the result!
Meta will eat itself
This software is absolutely amazing, especially when you consider the programmatic side of this. People bashing this without actually watching the video AND playing with the operating demo are really missing out. You don't have to like it but at least have a reason that shows some form of intelligence. Not just "the intro was poorly done".