photosynth demo

Photosynth has come a long way since I saw it about a year ago. This demo will make your jaw drop open in amazement. You know how when watching a sci-fi movie like Blade Runner they zoom in on an image and enlarge tiny portions of the screen? Well this demo shows this capability. Ok so we're not there quite yet in terms of being able to do that to any image because at the end of the day the resolution of an image is always a factor. If you take a picture on a mobile phone you will never be able to do much with it. But what photosynth does is postulate that of any given landmark there are enough images taken by people that are online to be able to create an interactive map of that place. So given the meta-data of images stored, say on Flickr, this application can build up a representation of that place. You can zoom in on any feature and can even fly around a virtual 3D representation of that environment.

The demo also showcased Seadragon which is a way of displaying 'vast amounts of visual data' onscreen. A really nice touch was the ability to show every page of a magazine on screen and then really quickly zoom in to a page you'd like to see with absolute clarity. Stored within corners of a page could be advertisements say of a car which again you can zoom into. But these ads can contain tiny extra images of further details so that if the person is interested they can zoom in to read that information. It's kind of like those micro dot things we used to see in old spy movies. It's a great idea and again done by Microsoft. When did Microsoft become the innovator again? Are they now the underdogs?