Recently a trial version of Photosynth from giant Microsoft’s Live Lab came out. This is more than new way of sharing your holiday pics! It is also a way to visit places online in 3D – places that you love, that you can’t remember, didn’t get a full perspective of or even never had a chance to see!
And it looks to be quite groundbreaking 2.0 software able to change the world of 3D panoramic imaging and mapping, something expected to become big, by using our collective pictorial memory of online photos. So professional use of Photosynth will probably also be quite interesting. Maybe someone among our blog readers additionally can fill in on that?
Through just one of your holiday pictures Photosynth creates a world, that connects all other worlds by hyper linking, grouping and navigating between online pics, eg. entirely of images from Flickr, then creating a 3D map or universe out of the total semantic information from the digitally available photos on www.
Tags and metadata support the emerging of a model for spatial navigation and full-scale online experience of that photographed place, from combining images. So, that one shot of yours or your own photo collection becomes a 3D entry point into the rest of the world. That’s a perspective that really illustrates the idea of ‘The long tail’. The benefits here just become enriched through more use and cross using; like it’s the case with most social tech and software. And software like Photosynth somehow also illustrates how www will evolve.
I’m quite curious and impressed by the possible perspectives of Photosynth and the like! To get your own impression, you can take a look at the Photosynth Live Lab presentation here:
