PhotoSynth
· 2008-08-22 12:16 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET
I've been waiting a long time for this to be released to the public. I've seen demos of this almost two years ago. A not so long time ago SeaDragon was released under the name of "DeepZoom" and now we can enjoy PhotoSynth.
What is Photosynth?
Imagine being able to share the places and things you love using the cinematic quality of a movie, the control of a video game, and the mind-blowing detail of the real world. With nothing more than a bunch of photos, Photosynth creates an amazing new experience.
I used a tool named FlickrDown to grab a collection of pictures from Flickr.com and then put them through PhotoSynth. The result is amazing!
How does it work?
Photosynth is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs: the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet.
Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point the photos were taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.
Providing that experience requires viewing a LOT of data though—much more than you generally get at any one time by surfing someone’s photo album on the web. That’s where our Seadragon™ technology comes in: delivering just the pixels you need, exactly when you need them. It allows you to browse through dozens of 5, 10, or 100(!) megapixel photos effortlessly, without fiddling with a bunch of thumbnails and waiting around for everything to load.
In plain simple English: It looks at the pictures, finds the similarities and places the pictures in a 3d environment.
Cool!
Tip:
Post your cool Synths in the comments!
