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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"
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That appears to be syntactically tolerable English. Semantically, though, WTF?
Then you closed the window about 10 seconds before the demo started. Keep watching.
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...watched the whole thing now... couldn't find the aformentioned "good part" anywhere.
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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!)
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.
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.
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".
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Right here.
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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.
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?
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 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.)
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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.
hmm... I notice that in that demo, it's running on Gnome. But now, Microsoft Photosynth "runs only on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista".
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)."
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Yep. I run Windows 2003 Server at work and it doesn't work on that either. I am pretty sure the Photosynth team wants it to run on more platforms. This is still a new product that is barely out of the research stage.