Saturday, August 16, 2008

Remember Photosynth?

That might be a strange question, but I'm just going to assume that everyone else has also been drooling over this Microsoft research/University of Washington project. And in case you haven't, it's basically a tool that takes in a large volume of photographs of any given environment, figures out how they are stitched together, and thereby creates a three dimensional environment in which you can walk around. All from flat, 2D images! Well it would appear that the technology has made it into a future product called Photo Tourism. My guess is that they intentionally chose the most boring name possible to increase the surprise and awe that will be experienced upon using the product. Success is when such extreme surprise causes at least one fatal heart attack.

Anyway, what in the world am I talking about? Here, watch the video.

Aside from the terribly unattractive UI (which is temporary, no doubt), the video shows off a bundle of features that are new to me and make the virtual 3D world much more friendly to navigate. I can't wait to play with this, and I really can't wait to see how useful it might be.

1 comment:

Rachael said...

I do remember photosynth - you showed me! This is sweeeet though. I can't wait to see this technology take off.