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It'll cost a pretty penny for that plane ticket to Italy, lodging and other expenditures required to step into a gondola on the Grand Canal in Venice, look around, and have the gondolier take you closer to points of interest along the canal. But withMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s new PhotoSynth software and Web site, you can now take a free digital tour that consists not of video, but of an array of photos stitched together to recreate the scene in three dimensions.
PhotoSynth allows users to combine an array of photos of a single location into a navigable, three-dimensional image called a "synth" and upload it to Photosynth.net to share with the world. The technology, which originated in a Microsoft Research project, is an altogether new way of putting photographs together.
"The photo hasn't fundamentally changed since it went digital," says Alex Daley, group product manager for Live Labs, which incubated the PhotoSynth technology before its release. He describes PhotoSynth as a "creative medium similar to photo or video, but just a little bit different."
PhotoSynth requires photographers to think a little bit differently about how they take pictures of a scene. It won't combine photos unless they are "synthy," that is, unless they overlap one another so that they can be meshed together.
For now, PhotoSynth is a consumer product, but Microsoft sees potential for commercial uses as well. "If you think about the commerce scenarios, you have this ability to provide a generalized overview of that that you might not have been able to before," Daley says. Take, for example, the possibility of a real estate site with navigable virtual tours of houses. Synths can be made to allow users to navigate around corners and objects as well as view an image in a 360-degree round.
PhotoSynth will be free, and Microsoft hasn't decided on a way to monetize it, or even if it ever will be monetized via advertising or licensing of the technology for commercial use. "It's more about engaging our online customers," Daley says.
Microsoft is moving the PhotoSynth team from Live Labs to MSN, and more specifically Virtual Earth. Users can tag photos with longitude and latitude today, but Microsoft aims to allow people to soon navigate to synths via Virtual Earth. Microsoft isn't yet further detailing other future integration with MSN and Virtual Earth, though the company says there are more plans ahead.
PhotoSynth can't yet create an image from a collection of pre-existing photos taken by many people, but such capability could be on the way. At the SIGGRAPH graphics conference last week, the company presented a paper titled "Finding Paths Through The World's Photos" that could create such images. "This version of PhotoSynth is only the tip of the iceberg," Daley says.
Other limitations: water and shiny surfaces don't yet synth well, and for now, PhotoSynth only runs in Windows. A Mac version is in the works, but with no set release date. PhotoSynth requires users to download an 8 Mbyte plug-in that creates the synths and to have or sign up for a Windows Live ID. It runs in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, but only on Windows today. Users are given a large amount of online storage -- 20 Gbytes or more than 60 synths of 150 photos apiece.
For now, all synths that get uploaded are open for public viewing, though people can choose to copyright their synths, make them available for use under the Created Commons license or place them in public domain. Users can rate and comment on each other's synths. Synths can also be embedded into a third party Web site. Going forward, users might be able to restrict synths to a smaller group of people.
source:http://www.informationweek.com
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