Microsoft PhotoSynth
I stumbled across this video of Microsoft PhotoSynth from Microsoft’s Live Labs. It’s probably old news for some people, but I was just blown away by this concept.
According to Blaise Aguera Y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs:
You can think about what PhotoSynth does as linking images together. Whenever photographs are taken in a common environment it’s as if you form a hyperlink between them. And so now, if you think of the emergent network of hyperlinks between images that can be built by, a crawler, say, going out and searching the whole web: that’s a very powerful idea.
Powerful indeed! PhotoSynth uses image recognition software not only to identify related images, but to place them in a 3D space relative to one another! Throw in some awesome 3D graphics capabilities and you have a very immersive way of browsing that space.
In the videos they talk about how your personal photo collection can become a “worm hole” through which you can access other similar photos. So for example, one thing you can do is take one of your own shots, and then, if you wanted to get a closer look at something in the shot you could zoom into someone else’s close-up photo of the same scene. Or you could find out what is next to your photo - or what is behind it.
What a compelling offering: Photographs + 3D world +The Network Effect.
You have got to check out the videos! Watch the overview first (the link at the beginning of this post), then the demo video (which can be downloaded from here).