Check Out Photosynth. Now!

From: http://labs.live.com/

Today were releasing our first Technology Preview of Photosynth. Photosynth combines hundreds or thousands of regular digital photos of a scene to present a detailed 3D model, giving viewers the sensation of smoothly gliding around from every angle. The scene can be constructed regardless of whether the photos are from a single or multiple sources. Its like a hybrid of a slide show and a gaming experience that lets the viewer zoom in to see greater detail or zoom out for a more expansive view. By viewing the photos in a 3D context you are able to get a better sense for the place where they were captured. Photosynth is a collaboration between Microsoft and the University of Washington based on the groundbreaking research of Noah Snavely (UW), Steve Seitz (UW), and Richard Szeliski (Microsoft Research). To find out more about how this collaboration came about visit our recently updated Video section.

Image feature detection and classification has always been a fascination of mine. These guys wrote feature detection algorithms that could take in hundreds of images and extract vertices in 3d space. Combined with a 3d viewer and some cool JPEG2000 powered image deferred loading technology they acquired from a company called SeaDragon about 10 months ago they have created a killer application.

Let's take a look at image classification as it is on Flickr now. It's basically tagging and simple meta data like file name, camera model etc. If I take 100 pictures around a town in Rome, I would have to tag all of them as "Rome". However, with this technology, if some one else has already tagged a Rome picture, my images might get tagged automatically.

Discovery gets about a million times richer when you have clever classification. I hope the next 5 years will see photo communities get more classification capability i.e.

• Face recognition
• 3d vertex/scene recognition like Photosynth

Microsoft continues to innovate. Only last week they beat Google Earth by adding far more sophisticated 3d buildings to Virtual Earth (and the technology to get all the major cities in the world by the end of 2007 due to a recent company acquisition). The obvious next step is a killer 3d application combining an online community, Virtual Earth and Photosynth. It's an exciting time to be in the industry.

Killer, immersive applications like this also remind us that the writing's on the wall for HTML/Web applications as we know them now.