Microsoft Photosynth Technology Preview

[NetRyder]

If you're into photography or imaging, you're going to love this.

The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest - and, we hope, most exciting - way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.

In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.

Make sure you check out the San Marco demo collection. The Tech Preview currently works only in Internet Explorer, so fire it up and take a look.

Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth

 

[Grandmaster]

Wow that is quite impressive

Can't wait for when it'll let you do that with your own photos.

 

[dave holbon]

Maybe I missed something here as at a quick glance its loads of white dots on a back background with photos stitched together. I wonder what purpose it serves and to what market it is intended?

:suprised:

 

[NetRyder]

Maybe I missed something here as at a quick glance its loads of white dots on a back background with photos stitched together. I wonder what purpose it serves and to what market it is intended?

:suprised:

The big thing is that it does photo-stitching automatically by analyzing the set of images that you feed it using image processing techniques like edge detection etc.

The current demo doesn't support this yet, but in a future version, you'll be able to take several pictures of a particular scene, feed it to the Photosynth application, and it'll automatically re-structure it into a 3D panoramic scene, similar to what it's doing with the sample image sets in the current version. Doing something similar manually is much more difficult and time consuming.

Research projects like these usually turn into features for actual products once they're complete.

 

[dave holbon]

So then you could (say) take loads of photos of your house etc send them to Google Earth and see the whole thing in both 3D and a fly through. Architects will love it but I think it’s the holy grail of photography manipulation and enormous computing power.

Why did MS not make it clear what it did or could do as the market for such an application is enormous?

 

[Grandmaster]

Well since its Microsoft's app I think the photos would be sent to Virtual Earth.

And the main page describes what the app does mate

 

[unknownsoul]

I'd love to see them expand their collections a bit more. I know I'll just have to wait until they've advanced into the next stage of development.