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Photosynth Demo
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Jun 06, 2007 03:45 PM
from the wow-just-wow dept.
from the wow-just-wow dept.
A couple of days ago Microsoft labs released a demo of their new Photosynth software on the web. Photosynth allows the aggregation of social picture networks (a la Flickr) into a completed image in addition to allowing a level of depth to image browsing previously unavailable. There is also a very impressive video of the demo available.
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Science: Microsoft, NASA Allow For 3D Shuttle View 84 comments
C|Net reports that a 3D software version of the space shuttle Endeavor is in the works, thanks to a collaboration project between Microsoft and NASA. The Photosynth viewer will allow fans of the space program an unprecedented level of detail in examining the shuttle and its surrounds at the Kennedy Space Center. ""It's much like a 3D video game--people can explore, walk around or fly around the shuttle," said Adam Sheppard, group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs, which developed the viewer. NASA said that the project could lead to more initiatives with the software giant. Chris Kemp, director of strategic business development at NASA's Ames Research Center, said that, for example, NASA could use the Photosynth technology on future space missions for activities such as inspecting the International Space Station and viewing landing sites on the moon."
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Microsoft Moves in on the Graphics Market 237 comments
Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft has quietly been building up graphics-related R&D, reports Computerworld, noting that Microsoft employees will be presenting one out of every eight papers at SIGGRAPH 2007. And it's not a fluke — other recent Microsoft graphics-related developments include Photosynth, which has been discussed on Slashdot several times, as well as the Silverlight/Expression Studio graphics suite, which will compete with Adobe's Flash/Illustrator/Lightroom/Dreamweaver offerings. At SIGGRAPH, Microsoft will supposedly have demos of some new software including image deblurring tools and Soft Scissors, which 'solves the vexing problem of how to cut and paste an image from one background to another if the image's edges — hair blowing in the wind, blades of grass — are very complex.' Microsoft's competitors aren't sitting down. Adobe's CEO, calling Microsoft a '$50 billion monopolist,' has questioned whether Silverlight will be compatible with non-Windows operating systems, and Google has also been building up its own graphics-related software products, such as the 3D modeling tool SketchUp, and Google Earth."
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Photosynth Team Does It Again 144 comments
STFS found an update to the
Photosynth stories that we already ran. You might remember the amazing photo tourism demos. Well, this new version kicks things up several notches with paths and color correction to more smoothly transition between photos taken in different lighting conditions. As before, this stuff is worth your time. Check it out.
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Microsoft Releases Photosynth 247 comments
Spy Hunter writes "Photosynth has graduated from a 'tech preview' to a complete service. Now you can upload your own photos and have them automatically transformed into a 'synth': a 3D fly-through reconstruction of your home, your vacation, or anything else you can take pictures of. Learn more about Photosynth at the official blog, see what Walt Mossberg has to say about it, or just go try it out right now." According to Mossberg, Photosynth works on PCs using IE or Firefox, but not yet on Macs. We've been discussing Photosynth since its introduction.
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I tried to WTFA (Score:2, Funny)
typical microsoft "innovation"
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I shrugged. Can someone take my photos on Flikr and use them to create new content without my approval?
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http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129 [ted.com] Click Here
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TED [ted.com] is definitely a site worth visiting away, as this presentation is probably among the less interesting ones you can watch there. More people should check it out.
The Software is AWSOME! However the delivery... (Score:5, Informative)
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Autostitch licensee? (Score:3, Insightful)
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The part that blew me away is the SeaDragon technology behind the image/information scaling portion of things... now that is just incredible... check out a talk/demo at TED on March of 2007 by Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Microsoft [videosift.com], just amazing stuff.
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The Photosynth technology preview runs only on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista.
If you feel you've reached this message in error, you can try anyway."
Wow, another innovative product from Microsoft.
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Yes, they funded this innovation by buying equity.
C'mon, learn how it works. It's the system you live in.
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Huh? (Score:3, Funny)
That appears to be syntactically tolerable English. Semantically, though, WTF?
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Pretty pictures.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
This lets you take all sorts of pictures of your room, and will automatically assemble them into a 3D environment. It will assemble your photos to look like an RPG, instead of a slideshow.
Using the example in the video...there are hundreds of online collections of people's photos of Notre Dame cathedral. Each photo is of a different part of it, from a slightly different angle.
This software takes all those different photos and assembles them into a 3D representation of Notre Dame cathedral, where you can look at any of the individual photos.
In addition, if someone identifies one of the saints in a statue on the cathedral, when you take a photo of it and your photo is added to the collection with the software, your photo will also have that saint identified--thereby enhancing the data contained in your photo.
- RG>
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Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
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WTFV.
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Yeah, it's pretty decently cool, too. Personally, I thought the magazine and the car ad with highly detailed information "printed" really small was as interesting a concept at anything-- it looked like it might provide a reading experience that would make sense for an online magazine, and the small print bends the concept of your printable space in an interesting way. So long as there are sufficient hints that the tiny text was there, it would allow you to put a lot of information into a small "space".
Th
Now that's a real summary! (Score:5, Funny)
Some impressive things (Score:5, Interesting)
I liked the initial viewing of large quantity of hi-res images and the smooth zoom. The aggregation of many thousand flickr images of the Notre Dame (including one of a poster on a wall) into a 3-D image was fantastic.
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One step forward! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:One step forward! (Score:4, Interesting)
Every single paper I've seen from MS research is great. Well done!
(from someone developing computer vision on linux)
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Re:One step forward! (Score:5, Informative)
That said, Seadragon's technology is great. It's a fantastically smooth way to browse arbitrarily large images or collections of images, and it was a good acquisition indeed.
(I was on engineer on the Photosynth team.)
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The Humane Environment (Score:5, Interesting)
The second part, however, shows marvellous stuff. Especially if what I think he did, was search for patterns in images, and compare those for unique objects to collect a library of images of a single object.
This guy and supposedly his group shouldn't work for Microsoft in my opinion, but would perhaps feel more at home in a fundamental science laboratory. But I think my opinion on this is slightly partial.
B.
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Microsoft bought out a company that had written the non 3D part of Photosynth and student(s) at the University of Washington wrote the rest if I remember correctly. At the time they didn't work for Microsoft.
It's here! Web 2.0 is HERE!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
All those next-stage, new-wave, super-hyped ideas that generated enough excitement to get a survivable user-base just kind of passed me by, because they only ever seemed to be minor amplifications of what we already had. But this... this is something totally new. And utterly, utterly incredible!
I'm so excited by this it's making me feel sick! TECHNOLOGY! INTERWEB! I take it all back - forgive me for my lack of faith! I LOVE YOU!
And by the way, that "content only limited by how many pixels are on the screen" idea has been a long time coming, and I'm deeply happy that someone's solved it. I could never understand why we use raster-imaging for computer games because it's a squillion times quicker than ray-tracing, but nobody had applied the same idea to other applications. Now I feel justified in wondering, and I'm so pleased with the result!
Re:It's here! Web 2.0 is HERE!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think that basic rasterizing engines are the limit. The limit is that the source data for all these pictures are tens or hundreds of gigabytes (and in the future, conceivably terabytes). Somewhere in the assembly and cross-correlation of all this data, they have to be generating LOD's (levels of detail) and dynamically loading / managing MIP-maps to keep the loaded dataset to a reasonable level. This is the hard part since "reasonable level" for loaded imageset size is probably currently a couple hundred megabytes or much less. You can probably load more data into RAM but try maintaining a 60FPS refresh with a gigabyte of textures - especially on a laptop or basic computer.
Once you've done this you can use a variety of display techniques... the main reason to use basic texture-mapping / flat rasterization is that sources are photos which are basically a pre-lit "flat" textures.
However, if you can generate a 3-D model and can separate lighting / color information (perhaps using combinations of day and night pictures or varying lighting from different photographs), it would be then possible to perform simple ray-tracing or other hybrid renderers -- think how cool it would look to have a dynamic artist's sketchpad with these images "penciled" in realtime. There are already high-frame-rate (near-realtime) ray tracing demos already out there for CELL and X86 that render moving images at a lower-res for higher-interactive frame rates and then when not-moving, render high-quality image stills that are quite impressive.
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Amazing Software, Lackluster Comments (Score:5, Insightful)
Covered on /. a year ago... (Score:4, Informative)
Just looking at that (Score:3, Interesting)
Vista is 'nice' but it's just a progression of what we already know - these tech demos give me a big warm fuzzy futuristic feeling inside
If nothing else it shows that MS is innovating again (at last) - Ball's back with Apple and Google now - "Make me more impressed!"
Data aggregation (Score:4, Interesting)
My first thought was about the U.S. government's "total information awareness" project, where they're trying to take lots of separate pieces of info (which are already available to law enforcement) and interlinking them all together to provide a more coherent picture... but most people consider that to be evil.
Granted, the government isn't doing it with vacation photos, but the idea, of finding pieces of data that are related and finding out *how* they're related, is the same. The difference in people's reaction to it, I can only attribute to the fact that people see the photosynth guy as good, and the government as evil. But I don't agree that the goodness or evilness of an action is solely determined by the goodness or evilness of who's doing it. The U.S. gov't tries this and fails. It expects that it can invade foreign countries and install friendly governments and torture people because it's "the good guys", yet the soviet union did those same things during the cold war and we admonished them for it because they were "the bad guys".
So, where am I going with this rant? My point is this: You can't blame somebody for connecting the dots. In fact, that seems to be one of the things that we, as humans, are particularly good at. So, if you think that this photosynth thing is fine, then I think you've got to grant that the TIA project is fine. Now, you could argue that some particular bits of information shouldn't be available, but the piecing it together to form a more coherent picture... I can't come up with an argument against it that I consider defensible. Sure, it makes me uncomfortable, but that's not an "argument".
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Technology is a tool. It is great to use hammers to build houses. It is not great to use hammers to bludgeon people's skulls. In no way does thinking photosynth is fine imply that TIA is fine - the fact that they (may) require the same technology to be possible does not in any way make them morally equivalent.
Vast Desktop... (Score:5, Interesting)
I dunno, I just like the notion of immersive environments, especially for conceptual learning. I think we're going to see a prevalence of this kind of interface in the near future.
Re:Does anyone have an actual video of the demo? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The people responsible for creating the intro (TED) are just the people responsible for giving the presenter a forum to share their ideas/technologies, don't let it color your impression of the rest presentation or the technology itself too much. The same brief advertisemen
Re:Does anyone have an actual video of the demo? (Score:5, Informative)
Also there's microsoft's page [live.com], which has the demo (I don't think that's new either). It seems to have some longer videos
Non-newness and marketing hype aside, this software is frickin' awesome. It lets you view and tag photos organized in a 3D environment that reflects where the photos were taken. It should be particularly useful once cameras have GPS built in.
I imagine the reason the software is still in the demo phase is because it's very difficult to take a large number of photos and reliably figure out where they were all taken from. For the demo purposes, Microsoft probably hand corrected a lot of the placements. Even so, everyone I've shown this too thinks its often (even non-slashdot readers!)
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mod parent up (Score:2)
This system was demoed a while ago, I think at siggraph. There are some videos on the original university of washington PhotoTourism page. [washington.edu]. Also here's a repost of the video on youTube. [youtube.com]
Thank you, that youTube link is exactly what I was looking for: A clear video demo of what this is, how it's used, with a nerd voiceover explaining what's going on.
No frills, no fuss, no slick intro telling me how I should feel about the damn thing, just info.
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Re:Does anyone have an actual video of the demo? (Score:5, Informative)
I can tell you that we did not tweak any camera positions by hand. The only real "editing" we did was to eliminate pictures that just didn't correlate well, generally because they didn't have enough feature points in common with the rest of the photos. We didn't tweak any camera positions, but the camera positions (i.e. the locations of the orange camera frusta when you have frusta turned on) are a best estimate, which is subject to some error. Same goes for the projection planes.
What's great about Photosynth is that from the perspective of anyone outside the computer vision community, it appears to be magic. Enough so that lots of the blogosphere was convinced that we somehow "authored" the 3D point clouds. Nope. It's more or less an automatic (albeit somewhat prolonged) process. The hard work is done as a big preproceess, then the client consumes largely precomputed data.
It'll be cool to see Photosynth in action in BBC's upcoming How We Built Britain piece that was announced on Live Labs [live.com] today.
I did a video interview [onten.net] about Photosynth a while back which is targeted at a non-technical audience but still might be of interest. (And I wrote the music for the original video [live.com] at Live Labs.)
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We know you tried this at least once... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:press release (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
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Dude, did you watch the video? The acquisition the guy mentioned was the first part - the zoom in and out and pan around lots of images. That was the "meh" part.
The cool part... the part where they constructed a 3D model of Notre Dame by using only photos from Flickr, well the Photosynth page says where that came from: "Photosynth is a collaboration between Microsoft and the University of Washington based on the groundbreaking research of Noah Snavely (UW), Steve Seitz (UW), and Richard Szeliski (Micros