Photosynth is Awesome!

Photosynth was released last week to the public after years of development at Microsoft Live Labs, and at Seadragon. There’s been so much talk about it lately too.

So I went to the site, and played around with some synths others have made. One of the most amazing one was of the Grand Canal. Sure it’s cool, but it’s not going to work very well if it takes a few PhD’s to make. So I decided to give it a try.

Today was Sydney Uni Live, and I happen to be helping out at the School of Electrical and Information Engineering stand answering questions for high school students. This was the perfect place to get started. Heeding to the advice of the Photosynth guide, I took a lot of photos around the place, making sure that I have enough overlap between each of my photos.

I took 163 photos in total (filled up my 1GB memory card) with my trusty Ricoh Caplio GX digital camera. Surprisingly, all that I needed to do to create my synth was select the photos that I took, and gave it a name. The software then took care of everything else for me.

Be warned that the process of stitching the photos together takes quite a while, so sit tight while the computer thinks for you. Despite the poor lighting conditions indoors, and the nasty colour noise from shooting at ISO400 on this entry level camera, Photosynth did it magic and synthed it amazingly well (100% synthy)!

Make sure that you take a look at the results!

(I’d really like to embed the photosynth here, but it’s not letting me put the iframe… is it because of wordpress?)

Hint: To really see the magic that happens with Photosynth, press “p” after playing around with the synth a bit. This will hide the photos, leaving you with just the 3D dot representation of the virtual world. All this just from a bunch of photos? Totally amazing.

More possibilities after the break!

I thought, this is a really good way to store photos! Imagine not needing to organise your holiday photos in any way other than just dumping them together, and let everything be done for you. It’ll also mean that your photos are more likely to be looked at than if they were just sitting on your computer as files, or worse, in an old-fashioned photo album.

Using this technology, the process of putting your holiday photos together would be a matter of:

1. Dumping everything onto Photosynth
2. In the future photosynth, imagine if it can use the 3D data from synthing all other photos on the internet to work out where your one or two photos should be located.
3. Let it figure out different 3D Groups for the different places that you visit
4. And then figure out the place names based on what others have given to the same area
5. Then you’ll have your virtual world consisting only of the photos you take.

Simple. (Not really for the developer + researchers though)