Change the Way You View and Share Photos
By ryan | August 26, 2008
Until now, the way people used to view photos was simple and boring. Maybe you would create a photo album to see all of the shots of a particular location. Now, Microsoft, along with researchers from the University of Washington have created a 3D photo-stitching service for Windows Live. This revolutionary technology allows someone to import photos of a particular place, and allow them to create a 3D view of the area. They really have created an entirely new way to experience and share photos. You can now explore them with amazing detail and scope, like nothing else you have ever imagined.
Synths constitute an entirely new visual medium. Photosynth analyzes each photo for similarities to the others, and uses that data to build a model of where the photos were taken. It then re-creates the environment and uses that as a canvas on which to display the photos.
The ’synths’ are created and stored on Microsoft’s servers licensed under a creative commons license, allowing anyone to add to someone elses images, helping speed the completion of a synth. A user can remove their own images at any time as well. Microsoft still retains the wireframe created from the images originally entered into the synth, though. There is definitely an air or natural evolution here. I agree with others that say a natural evolutionary path of this would be to add these wireframes, and maybe even the full synths to Microsoft’s mapping tool, Window’s Live Maps, to speed up the creation of 3D views inside the map tool.
Check out more at the following links…
http://livelabs.com/photosynth/
http://www.photosynth.com
