Posts Tagged ‘PhotoSynth’
Monday, July 6th, 2009
A few weeks ago Microsoft announced that their Silverlight platform was coming to the Xbox. Strangely they made this announcement at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, talking about Silverlights ability to deliver interactive advertising media. Whilst it can undoubtedly do this, I can’t help thinking that the advertising theme isn’t the whole story – if it is then it’s a huge waste of potential.
Here’s my thinking… If an update to Xbox firmware brings native support for Silverlight to the dashboard it opens up a huge amount of new functionality.
For one thing Silverlight would offer the Xbox a proven media streaming platform. Now this aspect may well be related to the advertising announcement. MS clearly want the Xbox to a platform for video streaming, whether that be though the Netflix linkup or their partnership with Sky in the UK. Silverlight could do the streaming and as well as tying in the context sensitive ads that the agencies would love. Past the ads though, MS’s streaming tech seems to work very well indeed – hence it’s use by many major sporting events like Wimbledon and the Olympics.
Silverlight would also automatically bring support for cool technology like the SeaDragon based DeepZoom and Photosynth. Whilst these may seem like eye candy, in the context of a living room they would work very well indeed, especially when combined with a Natal interface. I can imagine a panning around a photo album and zooming in and out of pictures all though gestures. I reckon it would really work.
But what else could it bring? How about an app store? I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I reckon the Xbox is crying out for one. Silverlight would offer a relatively lightweight environment for people to write small apps, and in the marketplace they have the makings of a system for monetising those apps. Now I could be talking nonsense, but I think that would be really exciting. The iPhone is a great platform, but I’d love to see what sort of things people would come up with given an Xbox and a big screen TV to play with. Hell I might even get the TED app I mentioned months ago! :)
Tags: App store, Deepzoom, Microsoft, Natal, PhotoSynth, SeaDragon, Silverlight, XBox
Posted in Home, Tech | 1 Comment »
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
I’m a bit of a PhotoSynth fan, I think it’s a fantastic technology. The iPhone has always seemed like an obvious candidate for a viewer, the touch interface seems ideal for it. Sarah over on on10.net spotted this, and I thought I’d pass it on… A PhotoSynth viewer for the iPhone!
The great news is that the client works really well, you can search for specific synths or topics, and pick from Recent, Most Viewed and ‘Nice and Synthy’ lists. Once you open up a synth you get the familiar view from one of the camera view points, and can move around the scene from photo to photo.
As well as that though, you can choose to view the point cloud that ties the photos together, and move and zoom around it in 3D. It’s hard to explain, but hopefully the screenshots help. The point cloud is nothing new, you can see it on the PC and Mac views, but it just seems to work better with the iPhone interface.
If you like PhotoSynth it’s a great little app. It seems the the author Greg Pascale was an intern with the PhotoSynth team at Microsoft last year and he’s written it with the teams approval. Good stuff! How about a viewer for XBox?
You can get iSynth for free from the App Store or from iTunes here:
http://www.itunes.com/app/isynth
Greg’s site is here:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/gpascale/iSynth/
Tags: Apple, iPhone, Microsoft, PhotoSynth
Posted in Tech | No Comments »
Monday, January 26th, 2009
With the Obama inauguration taking up so much news time last week I thought one of the more interesting takes on the event was CNN’s ‘The Moment’.
They encouraged people to send in their photographs of the inauguration which they are plugging into Microsoft’s Photosynth technology. The result is the a set of three scenes, two are the usual 3D compositions of the actual event in Washington, but the third – to my mind at least – is far more interesting.
As well as photos from people that were there, there are also photos from people who were watching at home on television. It looks like Photosynth has picked up on the common image on the screen and used this as the basis for building the scene. The result is a fascinating look at how people watched that moment, whether in their local bar or on big screens in a school gym. I wonder whether this is something Blaise Aguera y Arcas and the guys thought about when they thought up Photosynth or whether it’s just a happy accident? Either way, check it out here.
Tags: CNN, Microsoft, Obama, PhotoSynth, The Moment
Posted in Home, Tech | No Comments »
Monday, December 15th, 2008
Good news! Following on from the weekends release of an iPhone application for SeaDragon MS has released an experimental silverlight viewer for Photosynth. So if you have a Mac, just install the Silverlight plugin and try it here.
It doesn’t seem to have all of the functionality of the full client, and clearly won’t benefit from DirectX acceleration but it does a pretty good job I reckon. I’ve been trying it on work’s Macbook and it’s nice and speedy. Try it out and see what you think.
Tags: Apple, Mac, PhotoSynth, Silverlight
Posted in MS, Tech | No Comments »
Monday, December 15th, 2008
I’m probably a bit late with this news but I noticed at the weekend that Microsoft have released an iPhone application for their Seadragon technology.
I’ve posted about Seadragon and it’s partner in crime Photosynth quite a lot in the past so I won’t go into detail about the technology itself (try here and here for that), but the iPhone application does go some way to showing the potential Seadragon has.
At the moment the app is able to access content from the Photosynth site, any Seadragon RSS feed (though I’m yet to work out what these are…) and any DeepZoom composer files. It also comes with access to some example content such as maps – which interestingly also use the iPhones location awareness to show your position on them.
Whilst the app does a good job, I’d hope and suspect that it’s very much our first view of things to come. At the moment for example although the app can open images from PhotoSynth ’synths’, it doesn’t present them in their full 3D glory. Hopefully in future this functionality will be added as it would seem to suit the Smartphone/iPhone form factor and interface perfectly.
I’m also interested to see what the Seadragon RSS feeds are. I’ve not had a good look into it yet, but I can’t see anything about them on Seadragon.com. I’d imaging they are similar to the RSS feeds you can import into PhotoZoom. Hopefully I’ll be able to point it into my flickr account and it’ll Seadragon up my pictures!
Tags: Apple, Deepzoom, iPhone, Microsoft, PhotoSynth, Photozoom, SeaDragon
Posted in MS, Tech | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
Today MS have released Silverlight 2.0 out of beta. Great news for me as I can now get it rolled out at work and get people trying out things like PhotoSynth and DeepZoom (we can’t really deploy betas!). I’m really looking forward to seeing how people might use them.
The installation is here and is available for PC and Mac and supports IE, Firefox and Google Chrome.
An interesting note from the release material is that it seems like Apple are blocking a release for iPhone… I guess it gets in the way of their own plans? What with Silverlight on its way to Windows Mobile and Nokia, and WM Mesh clients on their way too, I’m going to feel a little left out with my iPhone.
Given MS’s current marketing campaign if I were them I’d be tempted to build iPhone compatible clients anyway. Then I’d show them working as much as possible and let Apple publicly deny them to users…
Tags: Apple, Chrome, Deepzoom, Firefox, Google, I'm a PC, iPhone, Microsoft, PhotoSynth, SeaDragon, Silverlight
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Monday, September 22nd, 2008
Although Photosynth has been out for a while, I’d not rally had a chance to play with it much until the weekend. After giving my car a quick wash I thought I’d take a few pictures and feed them into a synth and see how it came out…
(You’ll need a PC, Silverlight and PhotoSynth installed to see the embedded Synth – sorry Mac guys)
Here’s a link to the full thing: Linky
I think it worked out pretty well considering I didn’t take that many pictures. If I do it again I’ll take more pics around the interior to try and allow you to move in close.
Photosynth is definitely a cool bit of technology and could be used in loads of different ways. It’d be a pretty unique way of showing off my car if I was selling it online for example. In fact if I were a car dealership I might experiment with using it on a few cars.
Anyways…. I think it’s great. Give it a go!
Technorati Tags:
Photosynth
Tags: Cars, Coolstuff, Elise, Lotus, Microsoft, PhotoSynth, Silverlight
Posted in Cars, Home, Tech, Work | No Comments »
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
Well there goes the rest of my day… :) Photosynth is now out of private beta at photosynth.net. You can now sign up for a photosynth account to create your own synths and there are a host of new ones to browse.
There are a few things to keep in mind at the moment, all synths are public and you can only use Windows PC’s but I’m looking forward to trying it out. There might be a synth of my office up there soon…!
Tags: Labs, Microsoft, PhotoSynth
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Thursday, July 10th, 2008
Liveside have just posted about a cool new technology MS is building called DeepPhoto. It looks like a mashup of tools like Virtual Earth and PhotoSynth and allows photo’s to be mapped against the geometric data being built up by the virtual earth team.
With all of this information combined you can do some pretty interesting things. The video demo the LiveSide guys recorded shows how knowing the real world 3D references for objects in a photo allows the technology to de-haze images that are hazy for example. The real interesting stuff for me though comes at the end of the demo.
A photo of the Yosemite valley is mapped against the geometric model from Virtual Earth. This allows the software to increase the accuracy of the 3D view by extrapolating colours and textures from the real image. You can then move around this composite view in 3D – in effect filling in the gaps between the photos in a PhotoSynth scene.
Working for a company that does loads of GIS work, and produces visualisations of new projects, I can see this sort of technology as being genuinely useful to business. Assuming there’s some sort of API for adding your own data into the views (hyperlinks and additional models for example) it would be a very powerful way of visualising the sort of change we plan and design every day.
The LiveSide Video:
Tags: DeepPhoto, Live, Microsoft, PhotoSynth, Virtual Earth
Posted in Tech, Work | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
There’s a good post over on the MS Digital Memories Experience blog about how you can use the various Windows Live tools to add Geotags to photos without the need for GPS. It’s then followed with another post about linking your photos to a tour within Live Search Maps.
It got me thinking… That’s pretty cool stuff, and well done to those guys for putting it all together, but something that does all of that in a more integrated way would be so much nicer. I’m a fan of Live Photo Gallery and given there are so many other Geotagging tools out there it would seem like a great thing to add to this ’software’ part of the Live ’service’. Given MS’s other mapping and virtual earth tools this shouldn’t be a too hard to integrate (can you tell I don’t do development?!).
What I’d really like to see though are the things like Photosynth and Deepzoom. Photosynth still impresses the hell out me, and I can’t wait to see it working in a product form. I’ve used it in some demos at work as an example of what sort of technology we can look forward to and it always seems to capture peoples imaginations. Everyone can think up a use for it. Hopefully something will appear before too long.
Having played with the PhotoZoom site a little I reckon that would be another good addition to Live Photo Gallery. It’d certainly be a good example of Software + Services – click a button on your desktop and MS processes your photos in the background. Quite what format they’d be delivered in I’m not sure, perhaps similar to what’s on the site now, an object you can paste into an email or website. Sounds good to me.
Anyway… enough rambling from me.
Tags: Cool Stuff, Deepzoom, Geotag, GPS, Live, Microsoft, photos, PhotoSynth, SeaDragon
Posted in Tech | 1 Comment »
