I just ran across this; they're going to be showing it off at SIGGRAPH this week. Imagine if everyone on FT were to feed their travel photos into this thing.

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/videodemo.html

Wow. ^^

That is bloody amazing. I'm looking at my piles of picture boxes and wondering how to get them all online for that project.

That's amazing.

Cool. Broadband required.

Very impressive, I can't wait for it to go "live."

That makes me want to work for Microsoft and work with the people who think these up and then implement them. Wow!! I sort of still can't believe how the photos are linked/related without tags or the like?

That's pretty cool!

Wow. Looks like the Star Trek Holodeck is not too far off.

I have to admit that I'm pretty jaded when it comes to seeing "new, neato, whiz-bang" stuff. Most of it isn't all that new, neato, or whiz-bang. :)

This is jaw-dropping stuff. Absolutely amazing.

Generating a 3d environment from a collection of pictures across the internet of the same area using only image recognition as the tool to recognize "sameness".

Wow!

Wonder what kind of CPU horespower it takes to run this?

One of the guys in the video was demoing on a laptop (docked to a big monitor).

One of the guys in the video was demoing on a laptop (docked to a big monitor).
But the laptop was probably connected to a Cray sitting in the next room. :)

Thanks for this link; very impressive.

Many years ago I used to work in Microsoft Research (as a systems analyst) and it was amazing the technologies those folks were playing with. Nice to see they're still pushing the envelope.

Photosynth is live now. My old Windows box (XP SP3) needs more graphics horsepower, it can create synths but not display them. No Mac software yet.

Photosynth website: http://photosynth.net/default.aspx
How-to Take Synthy Photos video: http://blip.tv/file/1190926/
How-to Take Synthy Photos pdf: http://photosynth.net/about.aspx#guide

Way too cool.

Gonna have to play with this one.

Walt Mossberg had an article on this in the WSJ recently. http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20080820/microsoft-live-labs-creates-web-synth-for-3-d-photo-tour/

He was pretty impressed as well.

Cheers

<MOD>
I'm moving this thread over to our Travel Photography forum where it is better suited. A link will remain here in Travel Technology.

-sbm12
</MOD>

And, yes, it is very cool. I saw a demo a while back at a Microsoft Research thing in Redmond and I was quite impressed with what it does. Not my style for how I'd want to put together my images, but very cool.

curious: will photosynth's abilities spur folks here to rethink how they shoot, to be able to create and share synths?

curious: will photosynth's abilities spur folks here to rethink how they shoot, to be able to create and share synths?

Probably :D

I uploaded a couple of batches of files, and they turned out to be just 7% "synthy". I'll probably play around with some photo shoots that are made just for this purpose to see how they turn out.

Here is a 7 min presentation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html) (the founder of Seadragon) at TED University. As I understand it, Seadragon was the key component of photosynth.

This is pretty cool!

Since it requires a browser plugin, has anyone looked into whether or not this will work with Firefox? I like the idea, but I really don't like it enough to use Internet Explorer.

curious: will photosynth's abilities spur folks here to rethink how they shoot, to be able to create and share synths?

It will for me. I'm just wondering if they are going to be making a more commercial version of it, so those of us with plenty of spare time and camera junk might take photos of real estate, synth them, and make some easy vacation money.

Wow. Thanks for sharing!

As much-maligned as MS may be, I've always been a fan. There is an actual reason why they end up dominating every market they choose to play in.