Sometimes it surprises me to see that Microsoft still does really interesting research and very innovative products. One of them is Photosynth, a photo-mashup application which creates a collage of photos giving you an interesting new way to visually browse through photographs.
A couple of days ago a Firefox plugin for Photosynth was launched. I’ve tried it out, and I must admit that I can’t remember being blown away by an application, especially an online/mashup application, like I did now. I completely agree with Ali’s enthusiasm about this product over at EverybodyGoTo. You simply have to try it out.
Photosynth does the following: it takes a bunch of photographs of the same space, calculates the relations between them, positions them visually according to these relations, creates a 3D map of the photographed object, and then enables you to browse the photographs by rotating and zooming in on this 3D map and “lock on” the photographs of its various parts. You can browse in “standard” scene view (the 3D map view) or you can switch to the quite different, but also useful similarity mode, which arranges the photos by similarity instead of geographically. Currently you can browse through only 4 different photo collections, but this is just a technology preview. I reckon that this product will be used together with a service like Flickr, where millions of photos could be interconnected into an interactive map.
This way of browsing through photographs is not only incredibly fun - it is also Web 2.0 at its best. The more photographs there are, the more details and different views you get. Therefore, it’s a true community tool. It is also quite useful. If you’re an architecture student studying on the cathedral in Milan, there is no better way of finding out about it than this. Actually, whenever you want visual details about a certain place - and that’s often - I can’t imagine a better tool than Photosynth.
Also, the interface is groundbreaking. It’s a stunning, fluid, Sci-Fi movie worthy marvel that you can’t stop playing with once you try it out. On top of that, it’s quite fast and bug-free.
Simply put, Photosynth is the best product that came out of Microsoft in a long time, and although it’s still just a technology preview, I advise everyone to try it out - you won’t regret it. Check out some screenshots below. To find out more about the technology behind this project, go to photo tourism.
This is not a product. It’s a killer demo, but not much else.
Do you know how long it takes to make one of these experiences? Nine hours of compute time.
It’s fun to play with but is not YET a product anyone can use. Unless you just consider the entertainment purposes of a great demo.
@Robert: yes, I approached Photosynth only from the user’s point of view. I simply didn’t have time to do some research on how the technology actually works. The most important factor to me seems to be this:
Does this technology enable you to take some photos and create the 3D map out of them automatically, or does it take a lot of work and effort to create the 3D model and slap the actual images on it?
If the answer is the latter, then you are right: it’s far, far away from being actually usable. And thinking about how this technology could work, I’m thinking that this is probably the case. I hope I’m wrong, though.