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Microsoft Releases Photosynth
Spy Hunter writes "Photosynth has graduated from a 'tech preview' to a complete service. Now you can upload your own photos and have them automatically transformed into a 'synth': a 3D fly-through reconstruction of your home, your vacation, or anything else you can take pictures of. Learn more about Photosynth at the official blog, see what Walt Mossberg has to say about it, or just go try it out right now." According to Mossberg, Photosynth works on PCs using IE or Firefox, but not yet on Macs. We've been discussing Photosynth since its introduction.
Does he mean it will also run on linux? I doubt it...
Sounds ... cheesy...
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Doesn't work on my PC. Not even in FireFox.
Oh, wait, you misspelt 'Windows' as 'PC', an easy mistake to make.
Just in case you hadn't guess it was Windows only. It's from Microsoft and they care about making money, which they do a great job at. Linux and bug fixes do not make allot of cash for them, so don't expect to much support for either and don't whine about it. Thanks, so much. :)
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Wait a second. I have 1G of memory in my 2K system with a 128MB Nvidia card and Fx2, but I can't run this because I don't have XP or Vista? This is a definite WTF?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I want to take pictures of one of those weird places that are made to fool with perception, like that park in Japan, to see if Photosynth has the same issues with perspective interpolation as we do. Could make for some funny pathing and 3D spacial arrangements. Not only that, but figuring out why it fails could lead to insights on how our spacial perception works. I've seen this type of thing done in 2D pictures, and usually the algorithms fail in much the same way as we do, but this is a 3D mapping of 2D objects, so who know what would happen.
For me, using Mac just since 2003 thought me something...
"Trust us, as soon as we have a Mac version ready, it will be up and available on our site."
That thing is a lie. They are the same company who abandoned working Silverlight for PPC just about a month ago. So, if you think they will ship Mac version soon and ignoring Linux, think again. They are at least openly telling you in a way that "don't even hope", they are plain lying to Mac users.
A true multiplatform thing like that product they offer can be coded in Trolltech Qt or Java (both with OpenGL) . Can you picture MS using Trolltech Qt or offering a "Java Webstart" tool? Use OpenGL?
They are the same company who abandoned working Silverlight for PPC just about a month ago.
So because they're not developing for obselete hardware that even _Apple_ probably won't release their next OS for, they'll never release a Mac version *at all* ?
Your logic is broken.
Or perhaps it's a salient point because of the disproportionate usage of Macs among photographers - i.e. the target audience for this tool.
That's a fair point, but half the purpose of having something that can load up in a browser window is for cross-platform compatibility since the server (in this case, IIS) is doing the heavy lifting. Considering that the number photographers using Macs is incredibly disproportionate to normal Mac/PC ratios (probably 50%+ among serious photographers, vs under 10% for normal users), they almost certainly doomed the project to failure before it started by not having a standard, cross-platform implementation.
If you need platform-specific stuff, make it a standalone desktop app that talks to the site's webservices layer. At least with that, there's a reasonable enough explanation of why it's not (yet) cross-platform. I'd understand if it's not too useful in Curl, but any other browser should be able to handle it fine.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I do remember Microsoft discussing the possibility of linking Photosynth up to the databases of community photo sites like Flickr. I imagine this would be necessary to really make the most of it. You probably can't take enough pictures of the Eiffel Tower yourself to provide a meaningful Photosynth construct, after all nobody's really taking detail shots of the entire structure. However I dare say there's enough casually- or accidentally-taken images of crossbeams and information signs and panoramas on Flickr to achieve something striking. Now, what happens if you let it grab from YouTube videos too? If each frame is a picture of the whole, albeit low quality...
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Better question is why bother? Why would they try and entice Linux users? Linux users are notoriously cheap (I guess I can't speak for all but _I_ am a cheap Linux user) so they can't ever make a dime from them and in turn they don't represent a market. It would be irresponsible to use resources to devote to such a user base with no potential return beyond publicity. But even if they did it would just be labeled a devious plan to subvert Linux.
Maybe there is proportionally more PROFESSIONAL photographers that use Macs for image processing, but Photosynth is clearly a crowdsourcing application and its target audience is everybody, since now everybody has a digital camera and everybody processes their amateur images on their home computer. So we're back at the general PC/Mac split in home computers.
It isn't - that movie at the top is a demonstration, as you need the Photosynth plugin to actually use photosynth, and that most certainly isn't Flash. In fact, their labs page (the original location of photosynth) was in Silverlight.
put it in the PC and rarely ever look at it again
A main reason for that is that most picture viewers suck quite a lot, they make photo viewing a chore instead of making it fun, since you either have to navigate manually from photo to photo or because you have to wait quite a while for the thumbnails to load, which then of course are not big enough to be of much use. When on the other side you have something like Surface or Photosynth where you can freely zoom in and out and navigate the photos in a quick and painless manner, things start to become fun and photobrowsing becomes more an activity like searching through a treasure trove then watching a boring slideshow. You of course still won't look at the photos every day, but with such software you can actually browse large collections of unsorted pictures and have fun doing so.
So, a binary plugin should never be able to use unique features of the underlying OS? Please...
Anyway, Mac zealots would still be whining even if Microsoft had made Photosynth a standalone app, just as they did with World Wide Telescope.
According to these Mac zealots, it's wrong for Microsoft to make *any* Windows-specific software (standalone or browser plugins), but it's just fine and dandy for Apple to make Mac-only software, and such Mac-only software (like iLife) is even used as ammo for "Mac Rules, Windows Sucks!" declarations. (Well, turnabout is fair play, maybe Windows zealots can use Photosynth and World Wide Telescope as ammo for "Windows rules, Mac sucks!" nonsense.)
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000