ScriptTD, (Codeplex)

Photosynthing makes you money!

Garage innovation

Kinect Light Saber Wars

Eric Bennett joined me at Vertical World to talk about how it works using Tony Ernst as our climbing shooter. You can read more about this release on the Photosynth blog, and see the Panorama that Eric created on Photosynth.net, you can also see the one Tony created. This new release is available now in the iTunes App Store with other platforms to follow.

This is what people learn on Bing

Will Kinect put an end to gym memberships?

The future of touchscreen

Photosynth & Photoshop!

Also, thanks to the new feature that allows you to publish a series photos directly to Photosynth (Create menu –> More Tools –> Create a Photosynth), the geotagged option will allow the synth to be rendered and then placed on Bing Maps. Then all you would have to do to finish your synth is add a title, tags, and a description.

To get the new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery which supports this feature, just head over to the Windows Live Essentials beta homepage here and hit the “download now” button.

(via the Bing team blog)

After photographing the sites during the day’s filming, the crew was able to test theories later that night. This allowed Photosynth to not only play a role in the post for the film, but ended up allowing it to be used in the film directly. Nice!

The documentary began airing August 3rd. To find the showtimes for the film in your area, search your set-top box or DVR guide for the title and then set it to record.

Of course, the team itself is getting into the spirit with synths of their own. They’ll be covering a range of South African synths in addition to anything football/soccer/fútbol related from around the world.

The current showpiece is gafsynth's synth from the Opening Ceremonies, available here for your panning and deep zooming pleasure.

You can add your photos to the World Cup line up, too, by tagging them “worldcup” after upload. The best synths will be featured on the Photosynth homepage and some will even be featured on Bing worldwide. Nice!

When clicked, you’ll be able to post your synth to your Facebook wall…at last! The post will then show up in your friends’ News Feed.

The team also announced a few bug fixes too, including the following:

• The "x" to delete a synth from the "My Photosynths" page was sometimes missing. It's back now, so it's once again obvious how to delete one of your synths.
• The presentation of "zoomed-in highlights" (see here) was tweaked. They’ll never crop any of the parts inside the box you select in the editor.
• The forums had a bug whereby postings less than a day old would always show as being written "moments ago". That’s fixed, too.

You can also export your ICE images to Deep Zoom and HD View and there’s an ICE add-in for use in Photo Gallery.

Now, with the new update to ICE, it supports a “Publish to Photosynth” option. This lets you send your full-resolution panoramas to the Microsoft Photosynth website, which has also been updated to accommodate the new, wider imagery. Look for the new “Expand/Contract Viewer” button to the right of the plus sign in the Photosynth controls.

• Structured Panoramas
• Stitching Panoramas from Video
• Sharp Panoramas from Blurry Videos
• Creating Photographs from Videos
• Multi-Image Denoising and Sharpening using Lucky Imaging

Rick, beatnavy, fjcwhistler, siblog, cgsguy2, Mooseboys, MidnightFrog, rieskame, erickoo, BDsynth,Onyxmoon63, singalittlesong, kriskrug, GaryGlanz, brad_dennis, bal, jessica.glago, neilbl, msnbc.com,jimcseke, Lit, aeolien

(Click through on any of their names to see their Photosynth submissions.)

The top synths – aka the “most viewed” – included those featuring the sports themselves like luge, skating, curling, and skiing in addition to synths from Vancouver and those from other major events like the torch lighting, for example.

You can see some of these favorite synths in the image below:

For more Olympic action, head to the Photosynth site and search for Olympics.

You can also put this particular synth in “slideshow” mode to see time-lapsed photos of the speech in progress. Just click the play button at the top-right.

• Twitter Maps updates from Twitter are applied to Bing maps around the world. 
• Photosynth 3D photo browsing through synths inside Bing.
• Urban Graffiti Images of spray painted graffiti in cities.
• Urban Murals These are murals across the world including things like the huge guitar mural on the side of Hard Rock Cafe Nashville.
• TrafficLand An amazing array of live traffic video from across the U.S.
• Local Events See what events are happening around you.
• Newseum See newspaper front pages for cities across the world.

• Twitter Maps updates from Twitter are applied to Bing maps around the world. 
• Photosynth 3D photo browsing through synths inside Bing.
• Urban Graffiti Images of spray painted graffiti in cities.
• Urban Murals These are murals across the world including things like the huge guitar mural on the side of Hard Rock Cafe Nashville.
• TrafficLand An amazing array of live traffic video from across the U.S.
• Local Events See what events are happening around you.
• Newseum See newspaper front pages for cities across the world.

The speed of the imagery download when you zoom has now been improved in this release so images resolve faster when you zoom in to see the details. Also, Photosynth’s UI now has cleaner, more usable controls. All the controls for navigating through images are still present, plus there’s a navigation disk control in the middle – they’ve just been made over with a new UI.

The view control is the biggest change, however. Now when you hover over the “view” button (2nd from the right, above), you’ll get a pop-up that gives you quick access to the other ways you can view a synth including the normal 3D (synth) view, Overhead view, the 2D photo grid, and the Point Cloud only view. (See image on left).

While these changes are relatively minor, they go a long way to improving the look and feel of Photosynth, making it a lot more fun to use and easier to understand for newcomers too.

Not only does Overhead View provide you with a different perspective on what you’re viewing, you can also navigate to other parts of the synth via this view, too. Simply hover your mouse over the part of the scene you want to visit and you’ll be shown a thumbnail from that region. Click the thumbnail and you’ll immediately transition to that part of the synth.

The other updates in this new release of Photosynth have mostly taken place behind the scenes. They include a new Silverlight 3-based viewer, easier geotagging, better multiword search (in the team’s own words, it “no longer sucks”), and when you click the “view” button on the synther you’re automatically logged into the site and taken directly to the editor.

You can see the new Overhead View in action in this video here on Vimeo.

You may remember hearing about WorldWide Telescope (WWT) when it launched back in May 2008 thanks to a little hype from Robert Scoble, but since that time the once Windows-only desktop software has been updated with new features, went 3D, was integrated into Virtual Earth, and finally came to the web for everyone to use thanks to Silverlight technology.

Photosynth has also seen a number of improvements since its launch in March of this year. It was integrated into Virtual Earth, Live Maps, and Windows Live Photo Gallery, arrived on the iPhone and Facebook, and someone even figured out how to navigate synths using gestures. Cool! If you haven’t tried out Photosynth yourself just yet, you can learn how to do it here.