Photosynth by Microsoft

Now you know I am filled with no great love for Microsoft, I think they’ve done a lot to worsen software standards and generally fill the world with not great work. However, recently I have to say - perhaps they’re waking up and actually doing some really interesting work again. Not that I’m a gamer, but I think they got the X-box right and more importantly X-box live, leaving Sony and Nintendo to scramble to try and come up with a decent online strategy. Then there was Silverlight which left everyone breathless. And then the Surface with the cool alternative to touch screen technology using several cameras. While none of these are core technologies, I think they’re important and demonstrate Microsoft’s ability to innovate.

With all that I just saw the SeaDragon and Photosynth demo video. I’d heard and seen a little of it awhile ago, but the video drives the whole thing home. SeaDragon itself is really cool - I’m not sure how it works or what kind of horsepower you need to make it work, but all that zooming and panning looks really smooth - and keeping text as text is really great. This is waaay better than the Deepfish business they were showing for phones awhile ago. The acquired the SeaDragon technology and I think it was a really smart purchase (unlike their much bigger purchase of Atlas). But it’s the Photosynth bit that’s genuinely mind blowing.

Aggregating tons of pictures of a particular subject, complete with people blocking the subject in some pictures and differing resolutions of cameras, blur and all - it pulls them all together and composites everything into a stunningly detailed view of the thing and it’s environment. It shows you from what specific pictures it got little bits of it’s composite images and from where that person was standing in relation to the thing. Because it has so many it can make a 3d version since it can pull depth from all these differing views. Although, how it does that is pretty much magical.

You can pretty easily see something like this being integrated with social imaging sites like flickr and photobucket and further integrated with geotagged rss feeds and even local and global mapping software that’s all the rage now. Pulling up Google Earth and then zooming into the eiffel tower for a 360 degree view. With geotagging I think there’s a lot of coverage that could happen in an automatic sort of way.

Sadly the actual demo seems to be Microsoft only (hopefully at this early point and down the road they’ll welcome mac and linux users into the fold). I think this is completely big brain software of a sort that I haven’t necessarily associated with Microsoft lately - the demo seems like something more like what you’d see in a Tom Clancy movie where you’d snort and say, “yeah right.” Anyhow, this is something that impressed the hell out of me, so check it out. You have to fast forward past the BMW ad and then watch the SeaDragon stuff if you want, but definitely check out the Photosynth part of the demo.

Ok, on a bit of a tangent, I want this technology and I want it paired with the catcam someone built. I want to put those cams on a bunch of neighborhood cats (my cat, being indoors, would be much less interesting) and then get a photosynth picture of the world from a cat’s point of view. That’s what I’m talking about, it’s definitely showtime, Synergy.

Jun 8th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: microsoft