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Monday, August 21. 2006

The Seattle Times gives a bit of an update on Microsoft's PhotoSynth which popped up last month. For those who missed it, it's a tool to organize images by creating a 3D model from them by linking features found in each. That turns into a sort of 3D slide show one can explore. (See video.)

Of note from the article:

The analysts spent a day listening to presentations on every aspect of the company but clapped loudest for the Photosynth tour.

Photosynth, for example, makes use of "photo tourism" software developed by University of Washington and Microsoft researchers; imaging products and services from elsewhere in the company; and a novel display technology developed by Seadragon Software, a Ballard startup transplanted directly into Live Labs after an acquisition late last year.

Photosynth went from research to prototype in a matter of months — a limited public preview is due out in fall — much faster than the typical software-development timeline at Microsoft.

[Microsoft researcher Richard] Szeliski said computers powerful enough to run Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Vista operating system would be "quite adequate" to run Photosynth.

He [Szeliski] said there's no business model built around Photosynth yet, but could enhance Windows Live Local mapping software.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Microsoft at 06:02 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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There is some good depth on this within the linked pages (blog, UW paper, etc). As the self-proclaimed "poster child" for Live Labs, it is a most interesting trend to continue to have innovative 3D model and imaging solutions emerge from U.S. universities (USC, Berkeley, GTech, CCNY, etc). I sat with this demo in MSFT's SIGGRAPH booth for a while and wondered how the user interface would actually feel to an end user. Once the "wow" of the Vista-enabled motion graphics physics wears off, it is not as natural as navigating a 3D model. Note too that today this only really works in an urban build environment where there are lots of defined geometric edges to identify and it takes a loooooong time to process new images. The quote from the Live Labs video captures their thinking: "The ultimate dream is that we are going to merge the real world and the virtual world into a kind of experience where it is totally seamless."

This connects to Steve Lawler's discussion at GeoWeb about the "real world framework". Is PhotoSynth a 3D model data acquistion tool or a whole new visual interface? Will this new framework come from 2D image collage, 3D geometric textured models, QTVR-related tools, RGB point clouds, or something else? Or all of them?

#1 Tim Case on 2006-08-21 13:55 (Reply)

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