Photosynth Launches

Today, Live Labs launched one of our flagship projects: Photosynth. Photosynth is departure from nearly all approaches to sharing and browsing photographs. It takes a collection of pictures of a scene or object and computes points in the 3d space which represent points on the surface of the objects depicted. This point cloud then provides an immersive geometry which the user can navigate – a reconstruction of the scene – to view the images.

The videos below demonstrate how this point cloud describes the scene and how images are located in this inferred space.

Photosynth 1 from matthew hurst on Vimeo.

Here is the synth used in the above video. To create it, I took several pictures of the Kamakura Daibutsu and simply dropped them into Photosynth! Once you have Photosynth installed, have fun with the synth below. Hit ‘p’ to toggle between different modes (photos and/or point cloud) or use the control key. +/- provide zooming, and there are even Doom-style controls for another approach to navigation. When the halo appears – you can grab it to rotate the scene around its centre.

Congratulations to everyone involved with Photosynth. This is a huge, visionary project, and personally one of the reasons why I joined Live Labs.

Comments

[Andrew Hitchcock]

Very cool, I was hoping the ability to create our own synths would be released soon. I would've preferred it being client software, but a service works as well.

The website is down for me, but does this use Silverlight? This could be the feature that gets me to install it.

Also, I hope the ability to combine synths is added in the future.

[Pitter]

Good to see this blogs..the writing style is very good.....