Microsoft’s Photosynth
November 9, 2006 – 9:16 pm | by Benjamin WattSome months ago, Microsoft’s Live Labs showed off a rather cool application they’re working on, called Photosynth.
Photosynth is basically a new way to view your photos – you give it lots of photos you’ve taken of a given area, it creates a 3D area within which you can then view your photos (after much processing, trying to find landmarks), and then you’re able to kind of look around and see the photos you took in a given direction. It’s difficult to describe (so take a look at the videos on the Photosynth site), but if they pull it off – it will be truly fantastic.
The reason I’m posting about it now though (other than I didn’t have a blog back then), is that Microsoft just released a Technical Preview of Photosynth, which if you have Internet Explorer 6 or 7 handy you can give a try. The team introduce it on their blog.
The Technical Preview doesn’t let you add your own photos, but instead lets you navigate through some of their’s to see what it’s like – they’ve provided four different collections of photos in different places, to play with. I have to say, it’s really quite a nifty system, takes a bit to get your barings with regards to looking around, but as soon as you do – it’s quite an intuitive way to look at photos. For an early preview, and for something that’s currently browser-based, it’s all very smooth to move around and view these photos. You can also jump between a 3D view, and what’s called the ‘Similarity View’, the later of which is worth playing with if only to see the way all the photos jump up in the air when you click on them, hours of fun!
The possibilities into the future to look at other people’s photos too in the same place you’ve taken some, particularly if you’re trying to work out where a photo you’ve taken was, and even to eventually have a world of photos knitted together, is I have to say, quite exciting. If Microsoft continue to fund this project, the end result could well be worth all the effort.
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