Photosynth

Occasionally, not often, but occasionally I find out about some new technology that is so cool it leaves me speechless. The demo of Microsoft's new Photosynth is one of these technologies. Photosynth is a combination of Seadragon and image research from the University of Washington.

Photosynth takes ordinary pictures off the web (flickr for example) and combines them together in a spatially coherent way. Once all these images are stitched together you can then wander through the space, taking a 3D tour. The truly cool part of this is that the source images are regular, vanilla images uploaded by average uses. In a sense this technique could be used to take any image with metadata, especially geograpahic metadata, to create a virtual earth on steroids, one could even call it the long tail of Virtual Earth.

Recall the impact that Google's satellite images had on mapping, now imagine that you can zoom in from the satellite photos to pictures taken by people around the world. No longer being limited to the satellite view, you will see pictures of it from every angle. You can switch between the pictures to get a view from the different angles. You can drill down to detailed close-ups or back out for a different view. The end result would be a staggeringly cool virtual tour of the Eiffel tower, but don't forget this technique could be used on any publicly available image with metadata potentially creating a virtual tour of the whole world. Now that is one really cool notion.

The technology behind Photosynth gives is a glimpse at the advancements with more visual search methods, it will be extremely cool to see how this technology is applied.