Photosynth
MS Live Labs seem to be about to pitch an impressive development in image processing for the masses - automatically constructing 3D models and environments from (large) collections of arbitrary standard 2d images.

There's a lot of hype and little content at this stage but its an intriguing idea.

Yeah. I noticed this blurb on New Scientist today. It sounds like Autostitch on steroids, or would that be crack?

The thing I found interesting in the MS Labs piece is the following statement. "Photosynth is a technology preview of things to come but we want to give you the chance to try it out for yourself. The team is working around the clock to put the finishing touches on an experience that you’ll never forget."

I didn't know that MS followed the lead of Google and joined this "Labs" competition. I haven't quite come to grips with the way they are doing this, but it does sound intriguing. The competition should be good for internet users in the end.

MS Research has put out a number of really interesting niche "products" over the past few years and I know they spend a lot of money in some very arcane research so they've been in on this labs idea as long if not longer than el Goog. A friend of mine has spent the last five years doing pure mathematics research in Cambridge thanks to Bill & Co for almost no direct return as far as I can make out although I'm sure there is one.

MSR research projects include Conference XP, Portrait, Map Cruncher, Snarf and more here Many of these are either directly useful API's or better yet open\shared source projects so they are worth a look see.

This new Live Labs group appears to be an offshoot of MSR.

I wonder what will happen if we throw the entire Spirit or Opportunity dataset at Photosynth. If it could handle such an amount of data it sure would be cool. Imagine doing this on Mars:

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/videodemo.html

Standing on the rim of Endurance crater look around and zoom in on an MI close-up of a RAT hole

You can try the Photsynth tech preview



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

Looking to piazza S.Marco pictures, I found a familiar face:
Click to view attachment
Hey Mr Hawking, welcome to Italy!

NASA Photosynth Home

http://media.labs.live.com/photosynth/NASA/default.htm

Current collections include:

* The interior and surrounding area of the Vehicle Assembly Building, the largest one-story building in the world, used for housing external fuel tanks and flight hardware, and the location of the Orbiter stacking with the solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank to prepare for the space shuttle launch.
* Endeavour on the launch pad including amazing detail shots taken from a helicopter
* The previous flight STS-117 Shuttle Atlantis returning from Edwards Air Force Base in California to Kennedy's Shuttle Landing Facility.

The Photosynth technology preview runs only on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista.

Booooooo.

If you have an intel chipset mac it'll run 'doze

I know - I have bootcamp installed...but that's not the point.

Doug

I have a new system with Vista that I'm slowly migrating everything over to. The jury is still out but I kinda like it.

The Photosynth trial refused to install on Firefox (yes, I clicked on the yellow bar and all that). IE however did seem to work. It's very cool, but definitely still a work in progress. It will definitely be a while before we can plug in our Martian scenery.

BAH!

You need 128 MB of graphics memory. I only have 16 MB

Cool
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20080814/...d-photo-viewer/

That's insane. This whole concept of deriving 3D from a collection of random images is quite clever, and initially somewhat counterintuitive to me. I'll stay tuned to future developments posted here.

Someone let me know when the full version of either product is available for purchase.

Well, not purchase but you can try the source code:

http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/bundler/

An interesting footnote to the discussion about MS's research interests is that the presentation was hosted on YouTube, a Google property, and used source images from Flickr, a Yahoo property. And the closest thing I've seen in a production environment is Google Maps Street View. Seems like simply a neat program, until I realized I've used Street View in real life a few times. It would be interesting to see the cloud of photos/videos already hosted online merged with Street View, so that when you go to a famous location, like Times Square, you get a very intricate environment to navigate. It's too bad the location and time metadata for most photos would be imprecise.

Photosynth has gone live:

http://photosynth.net/

Anyone else here using Photosynth? Here's my gallery: http://photosynth.net/userprofilepage.aspx?user=um3k

um3k: I've been experimenting with it, too. I deleted some of my worst disasters which involved planetary images from various flybys. Here's my gallery.

http://photosynth.net/userprofilepage.aspx?user=rockhound

I really like the "rock pile" CR.

As soon as I find some time this week, I'm going to give it a try.

No luck! Photosynth doesn't work on a Mac.

OK I gave it a whack from my summer vacation photos:

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=DF020D...87-1767C6AA8333

I realise that part of what us poor deluded non-Windows users are missing out on here is the interactivity, but does anyone know if there's a way to export the results from Photosynth into a video format such as mpeg4 (or even, heaven forfend, Flash)? Perhaps a screen-capture movie?

Thanks, EGD. I was unimpressed with some of my early rover image results, so I made and photographed the rock pile to convince myself that I knew how Photosynth was supposed to work. As it turned out, I should have taken a few more photos of the back side of the pile to get a 100% "synthy" score. I was kind of hoping that identification of some of the rocks in the pile might encourage other geologists to comment.

Your Brooklyn Bridge synth was very good. It almost appears as if you took those images to feed the Photosynth engine. Nice work, indeed, even if you were not thinking of it at the time.

Wow, intriguing and very cool application, especially for freeware. I put up a test of my office.

I got some great pictures of the two barges stranded on the four-lane highway nearby, by Hurricane Ike. I thought Photosynth would match the images better than it did, but it's not bad. I think the best way to view it is to hit the "play button" and just watch it. I used 35 pictures. It created seven 3D models, and wasn't able to use 4 images. I think you'll get a good idea of what it was like walking around the barges. If you don't like the Photosynth view, you can just look at the individual images.

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=05415B...C3-C24D857EAFD7