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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.
but I couldn't... 30 seconds of ads at the beginning, then the phrase "through an aquisition".
typical microsoft "innovation"
~/.sig: No such file or directory
That appears to be syntactically tolerable English. Semantically, though, WTF?
Can we get an editor who doesn't post/write press releases too? We're geeks, we know about blogs, you can't bullshit us with your PR so quit trying.
It's insulting when an article like this appears and SCREAMS "We were paid for it".
Either write like a human being or stop trying to impress us, because you can't do both.
I like muppets.
that's the same crap ad-infested garbage hype video as the one on youtube.
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Then you closed the window about 10 seconds before the demo started. Keep watching.
Best Windows Freeware
The link that the GP posted was to the same video, but it splits the presentation into three parts (Advertisement, Enter Seadragon, The Photosynth Experience) that you can easily skip between. The good part starts at about 30 seconds into the clip.
Here is a better link to the video demo. Pretty Amazing stuff
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
I could only watch the video, cause apparently linux pictures aren't part of the collective consciousness. Still that's pretty fucking cool.
This system was demoed a while ago, I think at siggraph. There are some videos on the original university of washington PhotoTourism page.. Also here's a repost of the video on youTube.
Also there's microsoft's page, which has the demo (I don't think that's new either). It seems to have some longer videos
Non-newness and marketing hype aside, this software is frickin' awesome. It lets you view and tag photos organized in a 3D environment that reflects where the photos were taken. It should be particularly useful once cameras have GPS built in.
I imagine the reason the software is still in the demo phase is because it's very difficult to take a large number of photos and reliably figure out where they were all taken from. For the demo purposes, Microsoft probably hand corrected a lot of the placements. Even so, everyone I've shown this too thinks its often (even non-slashdot readers!)
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
In the interests of openness, would you mind publishing these calculations of yours? I'm sure we'd like to see your quantification of the open-source development process, particularly for software as complex as this evidently is. Thanks.
At least now someone at Microsoft seems to know _what_ to buy, this is some pretty amazing technology. I just hope that someday it will be available to other OS'es too.
I decided wade through the hype/ads/blah, and came across a really cool piece of software. It takes thousands of flickr images stitches them into a 3-dimensional mosaic, all just through software. No special on-site 3d imaging hardware, just a program compiling everyday images of something. It does this through some very advanced image recognition. If you can brave the ads, it IS worth it.
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.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
No frills, no fuss, no slick intro telling me how I should feel about the damn thing, just info.
You can't take the sky from me...
The QOTD seems very appropriate for this article: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Life is wet, then you dry.
You can stitch pictures of your home but we can see thru your window ! (streetview) But seriously though kewl piece of technology. Sundru
This guy and ... his group shouldn't work for Microsoft
Someone else pointed out that the actual work was done outside of M$, but I agree that it's a shame they were bought up. Expect this to be crushed instead of landing on your desk.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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".
The page also links to sample collections and a Photosynth Firefox plugin.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Right here.
Animoog.org
The people responsible for creating the intro (TED) are just the people responsible for giving the presenter a forum to share their ideas/technologies, don't let it color your impression of the rest presentation or the technology itself too much. The same brief advertisement is used across all the videos hosted on the TED web site, for all speakers, some of whom include Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Richard Dawkins, Bono, Peter Gabriel, Jane Goodall, Ray Kurzweil, Sir Martin Rees, Michael Shermer and Craig Venter and in that context the intro isn't as over the top as it may at first seem, if you think TED is just all about showcasing new technological toys.
youtube videos don't have ads, but your not the first one to mention this in this thread. Weird. Were you on the other site? Why would microsoft have ads in their own techdemo?
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
rather fabulous demo, I realize that that would tie in beautifully with the surface computing MS showed last week (which was lovely as a tech demo with little immediate use). :)
Vista is 'nice' but it's just a progression of what we already know - these tech demos give me a big warm fuzzy futuristic feeling inside
If nothing else it shows that MS is innovating again (at last) - Ball's back with Apple and Google now - "Make me more impressed!"
No, the demo is not rigged (and it's about 11 months old).
t / for a real application using them.
The whole thing is based on SIFT keypoints http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~lowe/keypoints/ . These are very powerful and work indeed as shown in the video/demo. Check autopano-sift http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/autopano-sif
There is only a little problem, M$ cannot use SIFT commercially. The licence says "for research purposes only" and the US Patent 6,711,293, Asignee: The University of British Columbia protects SIFT.
Near the end of his presentation, the guy sums up the technology as taking all of these separate images from various sources on the net and figuring out how they all interlink to present a larger, more coherent picture. He got applause.
My first thought was about the U.S. government's "total information awareness" project, where they're trying to take lots of separate pieces of info (which are already available to law enforcement) and interlinking them all together to provide a more coherent picture... but most people consider that to be evil.
Granted, the government isn't doing it with vacation photos, but the idea, of finding pieces of data that are related and finding out *how* they're related, is the same. The difference in people's reaction to it, I can only attribute to the fact that people see the photosynth guy as good, and the government as evil. But I don't agree that the goodness or evilness of an action is solely determined by the goodness or evilness of who's doing it. The U.S. gov't tries this and fails. It expects that it can invade foreign countries and install friendly governments and torture people because it's "the good guys", yet the soviet union did those same things during the cold war and we admonished them for it because they were "the bad guys".
So, where am I going with this rant? My point is this: You can't blame somebody for connecting the dots. In fact, that seems to be one of the things that we, as humans, are particularly good at. So, if you think that this photosynth thing is fine, then I think you've got to grant that the TIA project is fine. Now, you could argue that some particular bits of information shouldn't be available, but the piecing it together to form a more coherent picture... I can't come up with an argument against it that I consider defensible. Sure, it makes me uncomfortable, but that's not an "argument".
Sounds like an application of autostitch. The downloadable demo version is pretty neat and fun to play with, if you have overlapping scenery photos, for example.
Have you read my blog lately?
I was looking at the demo, and one of the pictures has Stephen Hawking in it.
Actually, as I looked at the demo, I couldn't help feeling like all that virtual space was looking like a damn nice desktop environment. Nevermind the part of the demo with a flat-on scrolly-zoomy desktop, as nice as that would be (Seems obvious in a way too... And wouldn't it be nice if Leopard had that instead of "Spaces" ?). But imagine the notion of opening up an application and instead of just popping up a new window it creates a new space - within the desktop virtual space - and brings you into it. You can always pull back and move around to another window or workspace, but while in it you'd be totally immersed.
I dunno, I just like the notion of immersive environments, especially for conceptual learning. I think we're going to see a prevalence of this kind of interface in the near future.
-- thinkyhead software and media
I have to say, there is something funny about Microsoft providing a Firefox plugin. Very cool in the geek sense, but kinda weird.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I don't like it.
Kind of like fucking a dirty hooker.
I installed it, then had trouble uninstalling it (it might have been in Unistall but I couldn't see it so I deleted manually)
I don't like executables being linked into Firefox.
Once a plugin is there, its executable and available to any page wanting to use it.
Anything additional is a potential expliotable hole.
liqbase
I'll have you know I also changed the word "often" to "awesome", but yeah, sorry about that.
Ah, I missed the word change. No need to apologize to me.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Did you watch the video? The one you linked from doesn't have much to do with the other. One is showing a collage/scaling technology, the other is showing a browsing/organizational technology that ties in sets of photos of the same subject and merging them into the same dataset. Organizing them in 3 dimensional space is only one of the layouts, it doesn't seem to be so much about "making a model"
How the fuck is that offtopic?
Not only is this discussing the content of the links from the summary, but the comment above and below are modded up.
Did someone give Microsoft's marketing department modpoints or something?
You can't take the sky from me...
I watched the video and I must say, as a professional photographer that is the coolest fucking photgraphic thin I have ever seen. But I still say microsoft wants it both ways. Use our stuff for free and to have us pay for theirs.
I hate slashdot
I was one of thee engineers that worked on the first release Photosynth. It's a great team, and it was a super fun project.
I can tell you that we did not tweak any camera positions by hand. The only real "editing" we did was to eliminate pictures that just didn't correlate well, generally because they didn't have enough feature points in common with the rest of the photos. We didn't tweak any camera positions, but the camera positions (i.e. the locations of the orange camera frusta when you have frusta turned on) are a best estimate, which is subject to some error. Same goes for the projection planes.
What's great about Photosynth is that from the perspective of anyone outside the computer vision community, it appears to be magic. Enough so that lots of the blogosphere was convinced that we somehow "authored" the 3D point clouds. Nope. It's more or less an automatic (albeit somewhat prolonged) process. The hard work is done as a big preproceess, then the client consumes largely precomputed data.
It'll be cool to see Photosynth in action in BBC's upcoming How We Built Britain piece that was announced on Live Labs today.
I did a video interview about Photosynth a while back which is targeted at a non-technical audience but still might be of interest. (And I wrote the music for the original video at Live Labs.)
Yea, I just bought 7 acre's with a shack in Hawaii. It's much warmer then Montana.
I hate slashdot
I closed the window when it got to "this has never been shown to the public" or some such piece of hype. Read the FAQ: Flamebait refers to comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage. If someone is not-so-subtly picking a fight (racial insults are a dead giveaway), it's Flamebait.
This is flamebait and this, from the same user in the same thread with the same insult, is redundant flamebait.
You can't take the sky from me...
You complain about Microsoft's acquisitions, and then later mention Google? Please, STFU. Now.
That's hot. Glad to hear the photos were presented as is (except for the ones that were removed) and that the computer vision works well enough to get lots of good alignment through feature detection. Seeing photosynth at work for the BBC should be great (I showed photosynth to a friend at the New York Times and it sounds like they'll be jealous).
First, it's spelled "douchebag$"
Secondly, despite popular belief, MS bashing has no instrinsic value other than somehow increasing the "Insightful" property of /. postings (go figure).
Finally, innovators have the right to sell their technology to anyone they want, even the highest bidder.
Error:
PhotoSynth was previewed and available months and months ago, like a year almost.
6 /06/windows-live-photodoom-alpha-silverlight-power s-new-microsoft-live-labs-project.aspx
The real news story today is about using Silverlight technology in a new Live project.
Today's MS story was about "Windows Live PhotoZoom". A set of features managing photos using Silverlight using some of the original PhotoSynth technologies.
http://www.liveside.net/blogs/main/archive/2007/0
Ya, PhotoSynth is a cool technology, but not exactly new, at least not today.
We know that SlashDot as the 'Faux' news of technology, but at least get the article at least '1%' correct, and skip the links with insane ads not related. People on here actually think they are MS ads.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
Gee. Talk about selective reading. Why don't you post the entire thing?
"This demo software is provided for research purposes only. A license must be obtained from the University of British Columbia for any commercial applications. The sofware is protected under a US patent as listed below. This demo software is a research implementation, while the licensed software has been further optimized for speed and to provide a range of other capabilities. See the LICENSE file provided with the demo software."[Emphasis mine]
Well, there's a demo on Microsoft's website. I don't know if that counts as "commercial".
I enjoyed it. Reminds me in some ways of Photomesa.* Now I'm just waiting to see the base principle applied to sound.
*"Enemy of the State" as well.
... was that it was a BMW ad that he was zooming in on,
as well as having BMW either side of the demo.
Someone obviously colluded _before_ this demo was even presented.
Don't know about everyone else, but I feel manipulated...
--
mefster can't remember what his sig says
I confess I had to watch the video without sound in my office but if as people are saying the image warping is automated, then it sounds very much like work done by Paul Haeberli of Silicon Graphics and posted in his Grafica Obscura notebook. He calls it image merging via a projective warp and works IIRC by lining up patterns in a collection of images automatically. It took like an hour to do this on something probably as powerful as a top of the line PC though so perhaps the tech in the video is not really doing the same thing.
It should be noted that he posts a bibliography too (below). I don't see SIGGRAPH but he does have the following. Not to diminish (too far) the developer's work but these things aren't created in a vaccuum you know. I do agree with other posts though, this is stunning and I'd like to have my OS built around this!
Incidentally there is also a creative commons attribtued video about drm that involves panning around a giant page with embedded videos in it. Also past work by famed computer graphic artist Daizaburo Harada did some things like that too, though of course about 100 times more beautiful and with music if I remember. Something also going on with morphing images of eyebrows and nether regions until your sensory apparatus is irretrievably hacked...
Clearly then, you'd be the one to ask... What happens when you enter "Jessica Alba" into Flickr and use photosynth?
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
And what makes you think that MS didn't buy alicense to SIFT like so many other companies?
there's a demo that is OS agnostic (java applet) on the washington Phototourism page.
Dude, did you watch the video? The acquisition the guy mentioned was the first part - the zoom in and out and pan around lots of images. That was the "meh" part.
The cool part... the part where they constructed a 3D model of Notre Dame by using only photos from Flickr, well the Photosynth page says where that came from: "Photosynth is a collaboration between Microsoft and the University of Washington based on the groundbreaking research of Noah Snavely (UW), Steve Seitz (UW), and Richard Szeliski (Microsoft Research)."
The Online Slang Dictionary
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
Deja Vu fooled Washington once. shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. This is no computerized 3d modeling, what they did is they are able to fold time space into seeing the pass at another location.
You forgot:
Quote
Windows XP SP2 and Vista Only
The Photosynth technology preview runs only on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista.
If you feel you've reached this message in error, you can try anyway.
Unquote
Typical...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This is where we find out that all myspace pictures were taken in the same bathroom... and in 3D!
If girls liked guys that were interested in them for their brains, they'd date zombies.
My intent was to explain why the earlier poster might have felt that the research teams shouldn't work for Microsoft. There is a long track record there of unfair business practices and actions that have hurt the industry. (That's up for debate also, I'm sure some would disagree about MS's effect on the industry.) In trying to provide an example I got too specific - originally I was going to state a more general claim about promoting windows (it does not currently work in linux, I've heard), but made the IE comment after trying and failing to use it in Firefox.
I admit to being a bit narrow-minded and possibly misguided. I'll try to do better. I continue to recommend caution when dealing with MS's business plans beyond research & demos.
All I can say is the presentation didn't look that polished. The dude doing the dog and pony show looked like a bonafide, neck-beard sporting, t-shirt wearing geek. The overly rapid pacing of his speech and lack of inflection on what he was talking about indicates that he probably wasn't a professional marketroid. He also appeared to be intimately familiar with the application which is a giveaway.
I've been imagining, and trying to figure out how to do, a combination of the two.
Have a truck drive around photographing everything, and run the photos into software to generate the 3D model. Now we see - in practically the same week - both parts of that in place. Just string the two together, throw in public-accessable photos, crunch a few terabytes, and we'll have one of the coolest applications EVAR.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Since you worked on it, would you happen to know where I could find some more detailed technical information about it (e.g. what algorithms were used, how it was implemented, etc.)? I'm a student working on a computer vision project, and I'm very interested in it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This page at University of Washington has a link to the original SIGGRAPH paper (PDF) which describes in rather general terms the mechansim by which Photo Tourism (the first shot at Photosynth) works. That paper (and its references should get you started.)