Google just added a cool new feature to Google Maps that lets you see photo tours of 15,000 popular landmarks around the world. If these were just photo tours with a Ken Burns effect thrown in for good measure, of course, this wouldn’t be very exciting news. What makes Google’s photo tours stand out is that the company’s engineers use computer vision techniques to create “a 3D experience from public, user-contributed Picasa and Panoramio photos.” → Read More
It’s telling that Apple chose an app that debuted more than 14 months ago, Instagram, as its “iPhone App of the Year” for 2011. This should not imply that there was a shortage of quality and groundbreaking apps released this year. Far from it.
From social magazines to music discovery apps to console-quality games that players can hold in the palms of their hands, there are hundreds of new titles in the iTunes App Store that will inform, organize, and entertain virtually anyone who owns an iOS device. As more choices become available to different kinds of consumers, however, it’s difficult to identify the undisputed champions of the app world.
We picked 20 of the best iOS applications that came out or received significant updates in 2011. The list is a healthy mix of free and paid titles that can run on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. (We will follow up with a separate top 20 list just for games, which are not included in this list). → Read More
You may remember Photosynth, the impressive yet somehow unsatisfying photo collage tool from Microsoft. Though I always thrilled to the technical aspects, I’ve never taken a shine to it. Maybe it’s the photographer in me that prefers one well-composed photo to a hundred interlinked snapshots. One game developer, though, saw potential that I never even considered. Krystian Majewski has put together what looks to be a very interesting point-and-click adventure game using Photosynth’s ability to essentially create “levels” out of pictures. → Read More
Microsoft is today announcing the integration of Photosynth, technology that enables you to automatically stitch groups of photos together into one big interactive 3D viewing experience, with its mapping service Virtual Earth. I think that’s really cool, because I’m a big fan of Photosynth and I also happen to think Virtual Earth is vastly superior to – yet immensely less popular than – Google Maps / Earth.
In the video it’s releasing on YouTube for the occasion (embedded below), Microsoft claims ‘hundreds of thousands’ of users have already used Photosynth – which was released to the public back in August 2008 – and uploaded more than 12 million photos in 350,000 synths.
Now it’s taking the next step by using Silverlight technology in order to make it possible for user to port their Photosynths to Virtual Earth, running on Macs and PCs alike. → Read More
Photosynth, Microsoft’s impressive photo viewing project that stiches together images to create pseudo-3D worlds, got a major upgrade last week. The app has ditched Direct 3D (which only works on Windows) in favor of Silverlight, Microsoft’s cross-platform viewer, which means that Photosynth is now Mac friendly. So if you’re on a Mac and have only been able to look longingly at our coverage of the app over the last two years, here’s your chance.
Mac and Linux users have been able to take advantage of an experimental Silverlight Photosynth viewer since December, but the viewer has been missing a few key features until now, and Mac users haven’t been able to really participate in the Photosynth community. Now all Photosynth embeds will be in Silverlight by default. Also included with the update is a new ‘highlights’ feature, which makes it easier to find important landmarks and impressive photos in the Synths you’re exploring (previously you had to wander around aimlessly to find the best shots). → Read More
iSynth (iTunes Link) is a new application that brings Microsoft’s impressive Photosynth 3D photo viewer to the iPhone. Photosynth stitches together user-submitted photos of the same subject, allowing users to ‘fly-through’ the area by clicking on each successive photo. The technology works best in places and events with many user-submitted photos (popular Synths include the Taj Mahal and President Obama’s inauguration). The site is very fun and often gorgeous, and is certainly worth checking out if you haven’t seen it before.
iSynth brings much of the functionality of the original Photosynth to the iPhone, and for the most part it works well. In fact, the touch-screen interface makes the experience even more intuitive than the original – tapping on the screen causes the app to zoom in on the highlighted photo, shifting the viewer’s position in the 3D scene. Unfortunately, because the iPhone’s screen is so much smaller than a computer monitor the feeling of ‘walking through’ each scene isn’t quite as good as it is on the original application, but it’s still fun nonetheless. And the application is perfectly suited for those moments when you just need to kill time for a few minutes – just fire up the app and take a virtual stroll around the Taj Mahal. → Read More
You’ve likely seen Photosynth in action before, but reader KSA sent this in and we thought we’d share. Look at all those people! → Read More
Although the utility of having Photosynths integrated with Live maps is questionable at the moment when compared with Street View, it’s only a matter of time before the map is a little more saturated with user-generated content. Imagine if a rooftop restaurant put out an official, well-done synth of the view from their deck — that’s really great exposure if it pops up when you type in “downtown seattle restaurant patio” or something like that when you’re looking for a scenic outdoor bite in the summer. Microsoft should be sending interns to offices and bars all over town with cameras, building this service up. I feel Microsoft has a long record of making cool things available but not pushing them or giving them the exposure they need. Photosynth and the underlying tech is fun and cool, but unless people have it staring them in the face, they’re not going to care one way or the other. They also need to integrate it more with the Live maps experience; at the moment it pops up to the Photosynth site, why can’t it be a little virtual window? → Read More
First off, Photosynth only works on Windows machines. That includes creating them and merely viewing them. I made this one using Boot Camp on my MacBook. That out of that way, this is a quick little Photosynth of Samsung’s booth at IFA 2008. Theirs was probably the most visually impressive at the show. More stuff on the way, as I just found out that the video I took with my cellphone is actually watchable. Amazing, this technology. The Photosnth is HERE! → Read More
In the startup world, server spikes and downtime are a fact of life. We’ve seen countless startups fall prey to the huge rushes of traffic they receive at launch, and while it can be frustrating at times (see past comments), it’s not generally viewed as a sign of failure or incompetence. But when you’re one of the largest tech corporations in the world, launching a much-hyped service, you’d think you might be prepared for something out of the ordinary. Today Microsoft released Photosynth, a site that stitches plain photographs together to create a pseudo-3D world. Microsoft first presented the product back in 2006, and has since demoed it a number of times. The two year wait for Photosynth ended today as Microsoft finally opened the doors to the public. And the millions of users who clamored to try it out promptly brought the server to its knees. Okay, so Microsoft’s servers failed. It’s not something that should be happening to a massive tech company, but it isn’t the first time and it certainly won’t be the last. But instead of issuing a standard explanation apologizing for the outage, Microsoft wrote a blog post that sounded downright happy. Here’s an excerpt: With everyone waking up around the world traffic has been on a steady ramp up since that release and has far exceeded even our most optimistic expectations. Getting ready for the launch we did massive amounts of performance testing, built capacity model after capacity model, and yet with all of that, you threw so much traffic our way that we need to add more capacity. We are adding that extra horsepower right now and should be back up shortly. Thank you for the incredible reception! We see similar optimistic responses to server failure all the time from startups. Except they’re startups. Imagine if Apple had responded to the iPhone’s server registration outage by proclaiming that it was overjoyed by the overwhelming response. It’s understandable that Microsoft is happy to have made a product people like, but let’s save the celebrations until the program actually works. CrunchBase Information Microsoft Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
I got to cruise over to Smith Tower yesterday to talk with Microsoft Live Labs about Photosynth, and as of this writing the site should be live and all the things we talked about will be available for you to play with. It’s best to see it in motion, so either grab that camera or watch the video above for a taste of the Synthy goodness. Sorry the sound is so bad. The video is a bit of behind-the-scenes stuff but really there isn’t too much there you can’t see by just heading over to Photosynth.net and testing out a few synths. May I recommend my own? Or, of course, you could look at one of the many gorgeous panoramas made up by people who work at some magazine called National Geographic — whatever that is. Read on for a basic explanation of what’s going on when it “synths” stuff. Read more… → Read More
I got to cruise over to Smith Tower yesterday to talk with Microsoft Live Labs about Photosynth, and as of this writing the site should be live and all the things we talked about will be available for you to play with. It’s best to see it in motion, so either grab that camera or watch the video above for a taste of the Synthy goodness. Sorry the sound is so booty. The video is a bit of behind-the-scenes stuff but really there isn’t too much there you can’t see by just heading over to Photosynth.net and testing out a few synths. May I recommend my own? Or, of course, you could look at one of the many gorgeous panoramas made up by people who work at some magazine called “National Geographic” — whatever that is. Read on for a basic explanation of what’s going on when it synths stuff. → Read More
Wow, this is really, really goddamn cool. I love how the “skeleton” created by all the photographs is visible, a ghostly meta-world based entirely on aggregate data and an insane amount of processing power. You can switch between day and night, rotate smoothly, zoom, it’s color-corrected, it looks fantastic. I’ll let the guys in the video explain just what is going on, but man do I want this on my rig. Deep respect to Microsoft Research and UW for putting this together. Check out the higher-res version at their site. [via Reddit and I started something] → Read More
I’m a big fan of all the 3D imaging tools in development around the net. Microsoft’s Photosynth project is clearly the most ambitious – it takes thousands of photographs of a geographic area and constructs a 3D model that the viewer can “fly” around and view. Tonight they are pushing a new 3D model – coverage of the Space Shuttle Endeavour on the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida before launch. If you are on a Windows machine only, you can view it here. Click and drag the mouse, zoom in and out, etc. There are other interesting projects as well – see our coverage of Everyscape, Fotowoosh and VisualSize. See also Microsoft Street Side and Virtual Earth as well as similar efforts from Google, which should eventually incorporate a lot of this stuff into one big interactive virtual world. → Read More
How long will it be until we can stroll through the streets in a virtual world that is identical to our own? Given the state of a number of technologies, not very long. Over the last couple of years we’ve seen Microsoft Street Side and Virtual Earth as well as similar efforts from Google. But different technologies are now being deployed that are even more interesting that the results achieved from large companies taking and processing massive numbers of photos into now-standard 3D views. Two standouts are Microsoft’s Photosynth Project and newcomer Everyscape, which Brady Forest wrote about today on O’Reilly Radar. Photosynth http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf First, Photosynth. The idea is to take many pictures of a given thing or area and combine them into a 3D image. Fly around it, zoom in whatever. The results are jaw-droppingly beautiful – see the demo video above by Blaise Aguera y Arcas from earlier this year. The BBC also just announced a partnership with Microsoft; they’ve launched a new site using Photosynth technology that will show 3D photographic representations of historic sites around the UK (Ely Cathedral, Burghley House, the Royal Crescent, Bath, the Scottish Parliament buildings and Blackpool Tower Ballroom). For now, though, Photosynth only works on Windows machines. Everyscape Everyscape is a much simpler product technically but is quite a bit more useful in the near term. They turn regular 2D pictures into 3D images that look like they were taken with special cameras. Viewers can pan around a 3D area, and move from point to point. See the demo on their site to get a feel for it. The video at the top of the post was created by founder Mok Oh and seems to show features that go way beyond the early beta version of the product. Everyscape launches this Fall, promising ten cities. Users will also be encouraged to submit their own photos to be included in the models. The company is attacking Google and Microsoft head on in those companies’ efforts to photograph the world and let people meander through it. They may have a chance – there are no special downloads required and they’ll be relying on users to take many or most of the photos used in the service. Whether they make it or not is unclear, but it’s fun to play with these products anyway. Good luck to them. Fotowoosh is another service we’ve covered → Read More
A team from Microsoft Live Labs will present a prototype of an awesome looking new photo tool at tomorrow’s SIGGRAPH conference in Boston. Called Photosynth, the tool will compile multiple images of a single location to create a zoomable fly-through 3D image. Other functionality, like looking up similar photos on the web, is in the works as well. PhotoSynth is the first prototype to come out of the new Microsoft Live Labs and is a great example of cool technologies made possible by corporate largess. If it works well when it hits market, I can imagine countless uses – the company bills the system as 3D Photo Tourism. If storing, sharing and moving around digital photos is the primary theme of most of what we’ve seen online so far, I’m excited to see what more can be done with composite images. Startup photo sharing system Snapmania last week unveiled a similar, smaller application called the Tourist Remover, which compares multiple images from different angles of the same location and removes unwanted objects from a composite photo. Unfortunately that application is reported to work poorly and in very few conditions. Microsoft has another service, Group Photo, that reproduces those functions. It’s a tough life as a media start up in competition with the big guys. Videos of PhotoSynth in action are available on the project site. → Read More
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