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Microsoft Photosynth is Amazing

May 5th, 2008 Posted in Building Community, The Internet, Things I Like

photosynth.png

You know those moments where you are introduced to a new technology and the only thing you can say is “Holy f**k”? Microsoft Photosynth is one such technology.

Here’s how the Microsoft site describes it:

Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.

With Photosynth you can:

  • Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
  • Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it’s megapixels or gigapixels in size.
  • See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
  • Find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing.
  • Send a collection – or a particular view of one – to a friend.

Yawn, right? We’ve heard about stuff like this for years and it’s never turned out, right? Check out the TED video below to see it in action. More importantly, watch it for the example the speaker gives where he shows what happens when you suck in all the Flickr photos of Notre Dame in Paris and overlap them all, no matter what part of the structure the photo is of and regardless of quality to create a fly-through of the 3-D space. Here’s another example video.

(The only complaint I have is it that it’s currently XP and Vista only. Boo.)



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This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 7:45 am and is filed under Building Community, The Internet, Things I Like. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • http://hyku.com/blog/ Josh Hallett

    Yep, it’s pretty cool, I saw a demo at FOWA Miami.

  • http://yagoosoft.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/community-guy-microsoft-photosynth-is-amazing/ Community Guy, “Microsoft Photosynth is Amazing” « YaGooSoft

    [...] Community Guy, “Microsoft Photosynth is Amazing” Community Guy has some interesting and nice things to say about Microsoft Photosynth here. [...]

  • http://www.salberg.org Lawrence Salberg

    Except that it’s been demo’d by MS for over a year, with no “in the wild” date on the horizon. Instead of using stuff like this to crush the competition, MS continues to release lukewarm software (Office 2007) and lose ground to Google – all the while getting sidetracked trying to steal Yahoo.

    All the cool stuff at MS could be crammed into a small separate company. The suits running MS are running right into the ground. Vista, largest European Union fine ever, IE8 standards issues.

    Ballmer needs to go and a real tech maven needs to be brought in. Maybe the guy in charge of the Live Mesh. Someone who *knows* that Office and Vista are NOT the future of M/S, but stuff like this – and XBox.

  • http://blogs.msdn.com/chkoenig Chris Koenig

    We’re really excited about some of the things that have been going on with the Photosynth technologies recently including the release of the Seadraon capability in the Silverlight Beta 2 release (see http://memo.hardrock.com for a sample) and a “supporting cast member” role for the not-yet-public latest revision of Photosynth on CSI:NY a few nights ago. Things are definitely moving in the right direction, and I am totally looking forward to the next public release of Photosynth to the public. For now, head over to the Photosynth web site and look at some additional synths that have been added recently and get to know Silverlight DeepZoom…

  • http://blogs.msdn.com/chkoenig Chris Koenig

    We're really excited about some of the things that have been going on with the Photosynth technologies recently including the release of the Seadraon capability in the Silverlight Beta 2 release (see http://memo.hardrock.com for a sample) and a “supporting cast member” role for the not-yet-public latest revision of Photosynth on CSI:NY a few nights ago. Things are definitely moving in the right direction, and I am totally looking forward to the next public release of Photosynth to the public. For now, head over to the Photosynth web site and look at some additional synths that have been added recently and get to know Silverlight DeepZoom…