Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Photosynth, VisualSize Comparison

Ping Liang at VisualSize.com pointed me to a new comparison they have done with Photosynth (see my earlier post on VisualSize). It is interesting to see Photosynth used as a yardstick in this space, however I’m not convinced by the comparison. The number of photos linked in a group is certainly a necessary statistic, but the quality of the linking is also important. In addition, the UI – which leads to an exploration of use cases – is far more sophisticated in Photosynth.

Nevertheless, VisualSize is still showing pluck and worth tracking.

Photosynth and the 44th President

Photosynth – a Microsoft product that was incubated in Live Labs – has joined up with CNN to create a synth of Obama’s inauguration.

We’re partnering with CNN to gather thousands of your photographs to create an immersive experience of the moment when President Obama takes the Oath of Office. From the vast sweep of the crowd to a close-up on the President’s hand on the Bible, every part of this historic scene will be frozen in time and presented in 3-D as only Photosynth can.

Well placed CNN photographers will capture lots of detailed shots for this synth, and if you’re there you can help make this an even more amazing experience by adding your perspective with your digital camera or camera phone.

Check out CNN’s page dedicated to this collaboration: http://cnn.com/themoment.

Angels and Demons (and Photosynth)

Sony Pictures have partnered up with MSN and are promoting the movie Angels and Demons with a competition which uses Photosynth (ex Live Labs). The initial site is up, which includes the trailer as well as a large synth of St. Peter’s Basilica. More details we be revealed on the site as the launch of the film approaches.

The competition is described on the site as follows:

In Angels & Demons, Robert Langdon discovers evidence of the resurgence of a secret brotherhood know as the Illuminati. The four elements Earth, Air, Fire and Water are key clues that will lead Langdon on a path to Rome with the hopes of stopping an unthinkable crime.

Solve the puzzles in the Path Of Illumination Contest and you could win a trip to Rome and more!

The contest begins January 30, 2009.

Photosynth Receives Award

Photosynth is a winner of the PC Magazine’s Annual Technical Excellence Award for software.

The hints about the Photosynth technology from Microsoft Live Labs tantalized for months, and the release of Photosynth this summer did not disappoint. It takes your collection of photographs, identifies the features in each, compares all of them for overlap, and links those spots to create a three-dimensional position. What you end up with is a single 3D-esque shot compiled from all the smaller shots. You can even use it to generate a "synth" of an object. Photosynth uses Seadragon technology, which is neat in its own right: Seadragon innovates on "zoom" relationships. It's how you keep drilling in smoothly to ever more detailed visual information in WorldWide Telescope.—EG

Congrats to the team.

[PC Magazine might like to check up on the progeny of our technology though – WWT doesn’t use Seadragon as Jonathan Fey explains in this interview.]

Nice Synth (nicesynth)

This is an example of something like a Photosynth art form - a synth still life (still synth?). With this type of synth, I like the way that you can essentially view the subject from angles that were not in the original set of images by manipulating the view of the point cloud.

Photosynth 2 from matthew hurst on Vimeo.

I've been tagging interesting synths in delicious with the tag nicesynth.

Second Beach Synth

We just got back from a great trip around the Olympic Peninsula. Here’s a synth of Second Beach.

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.

Photosynth on CSI

Briefly, Photosynth was used in an episode of CSI. Very cool!

Update: CBS, which produces CSI, has a pretty rich online experiece for the show. Apparantly you can watch the latest episode including Photosynth right here. I'm waiting for the episode to start streaming, but as I'm in Japan, I suspect it isn't going to happen. Let me know if you have any luck!

Below is a pic from the episode provided by USA today.

New PhotoSynth Collection Available from Live Labs

Briefly, there is a new collection available from PhotoSynth: Gyeongbok Palace in Korea. I would post a screen cap, but it is hard to do justice to PhotoSynth without actually seeing it - so please go there! Ok, here is an attempt at a screen shot. To recap - each of the dots below, presented in a 3d space, is extracted from a set of photographs. While each photograph contributes a subset of these points, in total they are sufficient to fully specify the 3d space within which each photograph was taken. The user can then move around the synthesized space and view the individual photographs projected in this space.

Next Steps for Photosynth

Photosynth, the radical new tool from Microsoft's Live Labs for browsing and viewing photographs has received a pretty good case of buzz from tech bloggers. One of the big challenges that the system faces is the problem of dealing with comparisons between a huge number of photographs - something it will need to approximate when it goes for the huge scale that is expected of it. However, there are many steps that it can take along the way that will continue to generate interest in the product.

An obvious step would be to increase the number of collections available on the demo site. However, rather than taking these photos from a test set, it would be fun to see them reach out to some online photogs and have them supply images to be used for demoing.