Posted on August 10, 2006 in Off-Topic by Mod7
My secret mole at Microsoft passed this little top-secret project over to me:
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/video.html
Wow, what a brilliant concept -- use the world's photos to reconstruct a location.
(Also worth checking out are the other lab-like projects that the Evil Empire is working on: http://labs.live.com)
Here's a snippet from my MSN Messenger conversation with said-mole:
jeff jeff jeff cat! says:
have you seen this?
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/video.html
jeff jeff jeff cat! says:
should try leveraging it for jerde v2
Wil (Mod7) says:
wow, that's @#$% [ed] wicked
Wil (Mod7) says:
i wonder how they will address temporal change
Wil (Mod7) says:
i.e., my photo of the woodward's building that isn't there anymore
jeff jeff jeff cat! says:
very interesting.. i wonder if thigns would gradually deconstruct
Wil (Mod7) says:
maybe timestamps. etc might help, combined with a little 'timestamp' voting where more images of a particular location exist
Wil (Mod7) says:
but, yeah, with incomplete, multi-tiome coverage
Wil (Mod7) says:
it could be a wild look
jeff jeff jeff cat! says:
it is effed up.. what you were asking about "what if a building goes away"
jeff jeff jeff cat! says:
that'll be a feature soon enough.. since photos have a timestamp, they're thinking of letting you look at a scene chronologically.. and possibly into renaissance time (using paintings & etchings). Spladow!
Wil (Mod7) says:
pow!~ that's HOT
jeff jeff jeff cat! says:
yeah dude.. soon enough there will be a public version. The crazy thing is - there's NO human input. All the positioning, stitching, recognition, 3d, etc. is automated by robots
Wil (Mod7) says:
THAT is what computers should be doing
Wil (Mod7) says:
i'm so impressed
jeff jeff jeff cat! says:
Almost as cool as the software is the mechanics behind it. It's a bit much to get into, but i'm glad to know there are smart smart people out there.
Wil (Mod7) says:
what's interesting is how that emerged from a rapid visualization tool