{"id":1172,"date":"2008-08-22T16:11:02","date_gmt":"2008-08-22T16:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/08\/photosynth.htm"},"modified":"2008-08-22T23:19:01","modified_gmt":"2008-08-22T23:19:01","slug":"photosynth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/08\/photosynth.htm","title":{"rendered":"Photosynth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Photosynth<\/a>A few months back, I heard something about Photosynth<\/a> – a new method of modelling scenes using photographic images to build up a 3D representation and yesterday I got the chance to have a look at it myself. At first, I just didn’t get it, but after having seen a few synths, I now think that this is really cool technology with a lot of potential for real world applications.<\/p>\n

It’s difficult to describe Photosynth but it’s essentially a collage of two dimensional images used together to create a larger canvas through which it’s possible to navigate in three dimensions (four actually). It began life as a research project on “photo tourism” at the University of Washington<\/a>, after which Microsoft Research and Windows Live Labs took it on to produce Photosynth<\/a>, using technology gained with Microsoft’s acquisition of Seadragon Software<\/a> and the first live version of Photosynth was launched yesterday<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Clearly this is not a straightforward application – it’s taken two years of development with an average team size of 10 people just to bring the original research project to the stage it’s at today – so I’ll quote the Photosynth website for a description of how it works:<\/p>\n

“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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Providing that experience requires viewing a LOT of data though\u00e2\u20ac\u201dmuch more than you generally get at any one time by surfing someone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s photo album on the web. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s where our Seadragon\u00e2\u201e\u00a2 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(!) mega-pixel photos effortlessly, without fiddling with a bunch of thumbnails and waiting around for everything to load.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I decided to try Photosynth out for myself and the first thing I found was that I needed to install some software. On my Windows computer it installed a local application to create synths and an ActiveX control to view them. Creating a synth from 18 sample images of my home office desk took just a few minutes (each of the images I supplied was a 6.1 mega-pixel JPG taken on my Nikon D70<\/a>) and I was also able to provide copyright\/Creative Commons licensing information for the images in the synth:<\/p>\n