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.

Comments

Some impressive things

[kiwicmc]

Unlike the first set of posters I managed to get over my self importance and watched a couple of seconds of BMW ads to see the actual video.

I liked the initial viewing of large quantity of hi-res images and the smooth zoom. The aggregation of many thousand flickr images of the Notre Dame (including one of a poster on a wall) into a 3-D image was fantastic.

C

The Humane Environment

[toQDuj]

This zoom-ability of the first part has a lot in common with the ideas behind Jef Raskin's The Humane Environment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy/.

The second part, however, shows marvellous stuff. Especially if what I think he did, was search for patterns in images, and compare those for unique objects to collect a library of images of a single object.

This guy and supposedly his group shouldn't work for Microsoft in my opinion, but would perhaps feel more at home in a fundamental science laboratory. But I think my opinion on this is slightly partial.

B.