Photosynth digital imaging - amazing demo

[DM51]

This new program seems to be able to manage and manipulate images in an astonishing way. Fit a whole book on to a tiny fraction of a page, create 3D images out of dozens of photos, zoom in and out almost to infinity... The demo by its inventor is amazing - he gets a standing ovation at the end.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

 

[greenlight]

that's hot

 

[Empath]

I ended up not watching it. People that make supposedly serious websites that blast you with sound effects wreck their image and credibility for me.

 

[DM51]

I ended up not watching it. People that make supposedly serious websites that blast you with sound effects wreck their image and credibility for me.

That is just a short advert for BMW which precedes the demo. It only lasts ~25 secs, then the main film clip starts.

 

[jtr1962]

My first reaction was "the future has arrived". This is to images what hyperlinks are to text. The effect should be nothing short of revolutionary. Really, truly amazing, and that's coming from a jaded city dweller who isn't easily impressed.

 

[Bravo25]

That is way cool. I could use it with almost 200 gigs of images on my HD. As far the WWW application it almost a big step towards AI.

 

[Sigman]

Incredible & exciting!!

 

[Timaxe]

There is a tech preview of it online where you can browse through some of the 'collections' of photos. Takes a little to get the hang of navigating it, but it is lots of fun and is definately worth it even if it'll only support showing 1 picture of the scene at a time (the video has it combining multiple images as you browse around - we just get to see polygon outlines of the view that image would represent).

See: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/



That said, many (~600GB worth) of my own pictures would be pretty useless for this. Something about shooting sports at f/2.8-f/2.0 doesn't let you easily spatially identify where most of my images are taking place.

But some (~100GB) of the other pictures I do take are specifically from a paticular position - panoramas. The rest (~300GB) are more photojournalistic in localized places. It takes a lot of work, but as the video said 'the sum is greater than the pieces'. Photosynth reminds me of how the images in my panoramas come together, except now they can be from just about anywhere once there is enough information to construct the spatatality of the scene...


At the same time, although this is exciting, it seems like MS will be asking us to pay to use their new toy, contribute our time and money to produce a collection for them, and then let MS profit from it because none of the individuals own the collective work and only those who pay for the software (and maybe even a license to access the collection) can access it. I just hope that my cynicism doesn't end up being true because this thing is really exciting and it would be a shame to smother it like that.

 

[DM51]

At the same time, although this is exciting, it seems like MS will be asking us to pay to use their new toy, contribute our time and money to produce a collection for them, and then let MS profit from it because none of the individuals own the collective work and only those who pay for the software (and maybe even a license to access the collection) can access it. I just hope that my cynicism doesn't end up being true because this thing is really exciting and it would be a shame to smother it like that.

Unfortunately, past experience with MS tells me that you are absolutely 100% right about this.

 

[UncleFester]

It reminds me of Google Earth

 

[COMMANDR]

Way cool, reminds me of the computer interface that was shown in a Tom Cruise movie Minority Report.

Gary

 

[AJ_Dual]

It's one of those things you know ubiquitous computing would one day make possible, but when you see it...

Oh... My... God... :naughty: