Photosynth Demo

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.

Re:Does anyone have an actual video of the demo?

[koreth]

Then you closed the window about 10 seconds before the demo started. Keep watching.

Re:press release

[koreth]

I don't get the point of that part either, but keep watching. A couple minutes into it he moves on to the real meat of the demo, and it's pretty astonishing. I won't spoil it except to say that if I'd seen it in a sci-fi movie I'd probably have dismissed it as very cool-looking but totally unrealistic.

Re:Interesting

[abigor]

In the interests of openness, would you mind publishing these calculations of yours? I'm sure we'd like to see your quantification of the open-source development process, particularly for software as complex as this evidently is. Thanks.

Re:Huh?

[nine-times]

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".

The rest of it definitely is neat, but if the recognition is done automatically, I wonder how accurate it will be. It should be good fun for some hacker to try to game this system and get goatse.cx into random places.

It's here! Web 2.0 is HERE!!!

[tygerstripes]

I can honestly say, without hyperbole, that this is the first time all those promises of what the web can really do - interconnectivity, automatic synaptic contextual linking, user generated content, and god-damned cleverness - have finally come together into something which is un-fucking-believable!!

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!

Amazing Software, Lackluster Comments

[Ided]

This software is absolutely amazing, especially when you consider the programmatic side of this. People bashing this without actually watching the video AND playing with the operating demo are really missing out. You don't have to like it but at least have a reason that shows some form of intelligence. Not just "the intro was poorly done".

Re:Some impressive things

[Threni]

> 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.

Yeah, that's got to be running on a bog-standard Vista install, hasn't it. I agree with the guy - I can't think of a better way to read a newspaper than to pan around and zoom in on a huge monitor in my front room. And I can't wait to see what happens to this system when it's attacked by spammers creating fictional spaces. Whats to stop people from adding the world from, say, Duke Nukem into the London Underground system?

Autostitch licensee?

[14erCleaner]

Sounds like an application of autostitch [cs.ubc.ca]. The downloadable demo version is pretty neat and fun to play with, if you have overlapping scenery photos, for example.

Re:The Software is AWSOME! However the delivery...

[ozbird]

"Windows XP SP2 and Vista Only

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.

Re:Data aggregation

[dabraun]

So, if you think that this photosynth thing is fine, then I think you've got to grant that the TIA project is fine.

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.