Vicissitudes

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I saw this a while back on PBS’s Wired Science. For the life of me I could not remember the name but finally I decided to do some good searching, and I found it! This software “takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space”. It is like taking a photo on vacation, then getting every other photo (that’s been taken and uploaded) of that same location from every angle recreating a three-dimensional space.

Photosynth is based on the research of Noah Snavely, Steve Seitz and Richard Szeliski in a joint effort between the Universtiy of Washington and Microsoft. Currently it is only in a tech preview stages (basically alpha) but I really hope something comes of this, and I’m sure it will.

You can read about the research at: http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/
The Microsoft version of the above page: http://research.microsoft.com/IVM/PhotoTours/
Find more information and download at: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

Can you imagine?  Take a vacation, snap off hundreds of photos, upload them, they mix with thousands or millions of other photos then reconstructed into an amazing “snapshot” frozen in time.  The places, people, the energy being shared around the world of our most beautiful places on Earth.

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