Entries tagged with photosynth - Channel 9

Anandan Talks About Digital Heritage Project

Larry Larsen — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:43:00 GMT

P. Anandan, who leads Microsoft Research in India, stopped by to show us a project they worked on called the India Digital Heritage Project. This was a very cool attempt to recreate the experience of visiting historic sites around India through the combined use of Photosynth, HD View, video, and ambient sound. While much of the presentation is 'on rails' like a theme park tour, just like with World Wide Telescope you can stop the tour at any time and wander off clicking and zooming and looking at the sites, and then click to jump right back into the tour. It's a very interesting example of what's possible with tools available today.

Ping 25: Comedians, SQL server, Photosynth, Facebook, Zune, Bingle

Laura Foy — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 04:57:00 GMT

For entertainment purposes only we decided to invited our friend, established comedian Kirk Fox into the Ping lair...here's how it all went down:

Jonathon Mann wins a BINGLE
Secret Service SQL Server
PhotoSynth and Facebook
What does Zune HD mean for you?
Do viral videos work?

And more...let us know your thoughts!

Fly Me To the Moon

Larry Larsen — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:11:00 GMT

40 years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin Jr. set down on the surface of the moon (with Michael Collins waiting up top) achieving the dream of billions of humans who came before them. Neil was the shutterbug of the mission and took a number great pictures despite the brutal conditions (moon dust is like talcum powder, try getting that off your lens with your thickest gloves on.)

What happens when you take some of the best images from the Apollo program and feed them into Photosynth? That's what I wanted to find out. Here is a Photosynth from images taken off from the Apollo 17 Command Module's 28th Revolution around the moon. After it loads, hold the 'CTRL' key to see the point cloud, Photosynth has created a 3D model from the images. If you press the 'a' key you can see the arc of the orbit from the side. These images are very high res so use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

Now for Apollo 11. Before looking at these synths increase the Photosynth interface size ('f' key), you might want to put on some Major Tom or Dark Side of the Moon too. I spent hours looking at this synth after making it. It's an amazing way to explore man's greatest destination. I created some highlights to help you navigate around the really cool stuff. The first is a particularly synthy set of images. Next is the iconic footprint image, you can click on it to toggle to the before picture. Until I synthed these photos I didn't even know there was a picture of the surface where the first footprint would be. The next highlight is a view looking out of Eagle at the flag, and then Eagle from the outside. I highlighted an image that didn't map to any others that when zoomed in looks like a folded pair of sequined socks, no doubt part of the Moonwalker conspiracy theory.

I also made an Apollo 11 synth that is just 3D anaglyph images, you'll need some Red/Blue glasses. It's best viewed with grid view. Here are the 3D images from Apollo 12.

Apollo 17, the last manned mission to the moon, has the best pictures. By 17, mission planners have image stitching on the mind, there are hundreds of overlapping photos. For this synth I used 1022 images, a mixture of black and white and color. My machine crunched this synth all night long and by morning gave me this amazing collection.

Scroll down for a list of Photosynth keyboard shortcuts.

Apollo 11 Campsite

Apollo 12 Campsite

Apollo 17 Campsite

Apollo 11 3D Images

Apollo 12 3D Images

Apollo 17 - 28th Revolution

Photosynth Viewer Keyboard Shortcuts

Zooming and Neighbors

Scroll wheel	Scrolling the mouse wheel zooms you in or out. The zooming is centered around your current mouse position.
+ or -	Zoom in or out around the center of the window.
← or →	Move left or right to a neighboring photo, when one is available.
↑ or ↓	Move inwards or outwards to a neighboring photo, when one is available.
u or j	Move up or down to a neighboring photo, when one is available.
Tours and History

Spacebar	Go to next photo in the spatial tour.
Shift-spacebar	Go to next photo in alphabetical order by filename. (Depending on your camera, this is usually shooting order.)
. (period)	Go to next photo in alphabetical order by filename. (Depending on your camera, this is usually shooting order.)
, (comma)	Go to previous photo in alphabetical order by filename.
Z	Go to the last image you were on. (Like Back in a Web browser.)
Z	Undo z. (Like Forward in a Web browser.)
Fun with the Point Cloud

Ctrl	Holding the control key down temporarily hides all photos allowing you to see the point cloud in all its glory. Dragging a halo with the control button down lets you spin around the entire point cloud. Try it!
P	Switches among three modes: points, images, both.
Useful Shortcuts

Enter	Center the current image
F	Toggle full-screen
~	Toggle between 2D and 3D
M	Go to the next 3D group in the synth
Y	Toggles world-up verses image-up. This is useful when Photosynth has trouble working out which way is up.
Free Navigation (Only in 3D view)

A	Strafe left
D	Strafe right
W	Move forward
S	Move backward
E	Move up
C	Move down
L	Rotate left
‘	Rotate right
[	Rotate up
;	Rotate down

Silverlight powered Photosynths for NASA

Adam Kinney — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:34:00 GMT

Supercomputers and robots with frickin' lasers! Laurence Moroney tells the tale of the creation of the NASA Photosynths of the International Space Station and the Mars Science Laboratory. And the best part is, even though you may not have supercomputers laying around the house, you can build your own Photosynth at Photosynth.net.

Code posted for NZSynth, a Silverlight Deep Zoom Flickr Mosiac code mash

Adam Kinney — Fri, 22 May 2009 02:45:00 GMT

Nigel Parker, who worked on the NZsynth application from WEB09, has posted the NZSynth source code, end-to-end video covering the development and links to all of his resources and tools. I really like the added popup full photo feature, that's available when you zoom in and click.

NZsynth Building a Clickable Mosaic with DeepZoom and Silverlight 2

Nigel — Sun, 17 May 2009 20:11:00 GMT

It started as a conversation about "crowd sourcing" images that people have already tagged as New Zealand to construct a demo from our shipping Silverlight 2 technology. I spent 3 days building a "demo-ware" prototype and presented it during a keynote slot at WEB09.

Following that we held a Silverlight 3 camp over 3 1/2 days. At the camp Tim (a devloper from Wellington) improved my original prototype to make the image tiles clickable. I then took Tims work and adapted it to make a version two of my original design.

Read more and grab the source code at http://tr.im/nzsynth and http://tr.im/nzsynthV2

Enjoy!

NASA Photosynths of the Space Station and Mars Rover released in Silverlight

Adam Kinney — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:31:00 GMT

Marking the first release enabling businesses to use Photosynth, NASA has launched two Photosynths today, the International Space Station and the new Mars Science Laboratory. For more information the Photosynth team has released a video about the Virtual Earth integration.

TCSWeekly 006 - Silverlight is fizzing along with Moonlight and Contests

Adam Kinney — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 17:47:00 GMT

My favorite episode so far - strong news-wise (Moonlight 1.0 ships, Tim Sneath reports Silverlight is fizzing, and a $5000 Silverlight game contest), hearty tutorials including how to use AddIns in Blend and mesmorizing colorful demos.

Stories covered in this episode include:

<-- Episode 5

TCSWeekly 005 - a UX Pattern Explorer and more Designer-ready content

Adam Kinney — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 17:34:00 GMT

This turned out to be a pretty design-centric episode. Quince the new UX Design Pattern Explorer launched, Illustrator to XAML plug-in is ready to be tested, Alex Knight a XAML Designer is featured and Stimulant shows off their Surface skills.

Stories covered in this episode include:


<-- Episode 4		Episode 6 -->

TCSWeekly 002 - Obama, Silverlight 3, 3D Models and Virtual Earth

Adam Kinney — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:05:00 GMT

The biggest news from last week in the Microsoft Client World is tied to the biggest news of January, possibly of the year 2009. If you haven't already heard it echoed on twitter and blogs, last week the Presidential Inauguration Committee announced the event will be streamed in Silverlight. If you missed the ceremony you're in luck, they will also be making the video available on demand in the future.

Other Stories mentioned in this episode include:


<-- Episode 1		Episode 3 -->

Drew Steedly and Joshua Podolak on Photosynth

Dan Fernandez — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:41:00 GMT

PhotoSynth is a technology that automatically combines 2D photos into an immersive 3D environment.

In this interview, we talk to Drew Steedly and Joshua Podolak.

Drew helped develop the "synther" which takes hundreds of images and combines them into a synth. He walks through how they use parallelism and sparse solver equations to optimize synths.

Joshua helped develop the "viewer", the client application that you use to navigate a Photosynth. He discusses how they use JSON for metadata, how they use the synther point cloud to do random sampling to project images in a 3D plane and how the goal of the viewer is to provide an intuitive UX for end users.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas: The technology behind Photosynth

Dan Fernandez — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:36:00 GMT

PhotoSynth is a technology that automatically combines 2D photos into an immersive 3D environment.

With the official release of Photosynth, we catch up with Blaise Aguera y Arcas, one of the Photosynth architects to talk about the technology and team that powers

More Photosynth love:
- Laura Foy's 3-minute overview on Photosynth
- Nic Fillingham's Photosynth Shutter Speed episode
- Max Zuckerman interviews Noah Snavely, who originally created the Photosynth project while a student at the University of Washington

Also, for an in depth look into the technologies addressed here, see the Photosynth Going Deep from 2006 with Blaise.

PhotoSynth: What. How. Why.

Charles — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 17:30:00 GMT

Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an Architect of PhotoSynth, which is a super cool 3-D image "tourism" application that enables a new methodology for exploring related groups of images using a complex imaging algorithm developed in part by Microsoft Research. Here, Charles sits down with Blaise to learn the details of the What How and Why of this highly innovative distributed 3-D image processing application. PhotoSynth enables a whole new way of exlporing images! Wow.

To find out more on how to use Photosynth, watch this video on 10.