“Demo of the year” of 2006 released by Microsoft
If you go to Google and search for “demo of the year” you’ll find my 2006 post about Microsoft’s Photosynth. It was that good. The demo is still among my favorite I’ve ever seen (and I’ve sat through thousands of demos).
A few minutes ago Microsoft released Photosynth for all of us to use.
What does Photosynth do? You take a bunch of photos of something, like the outside of your house. Shoot a bunch from different locations. It’s best to have between 20 and 300 photos, the Photosynth team tells me. Then it creates a 3D mesh of all the photos that you can “walk” through. There are several demo Photosynths on the site.
I am uploading some of my family room right now, will let you know how that works later tonight. Just wanted to let you know you can play with it too.
UPDATE: My images are now uploaded so you can see a Photosynth of my family room (can you find baby Milan?) and O’Reilly has a nice writeup on the release.
UPDATE2: There’s even more on TechMeme.
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August 20th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Windows only. Guess we Mac people are out in the cold, again. I’ll have to take your word for the fact that it’s cool.
August 20th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Is it bad I feel annoyed I have to download something?
August 20th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Switch to PC Stanton ;)
August 20th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Stanton: yup, Windows only. You should get VMWare on your Mac.
August 20th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
..or do like the ‘other’ rest of us and use all of the above?
August 20th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Or Microsoft knowing that a lot of photographers use macs, could have allocated the resources to make it work with macs when it launched.
August 20th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
I don’t want to engage in a full on OS jihad, but why would Microsoft release this for the Mac? It’s a technology demonstration, so it’s to their advantage to restrict it to the OS they sell.
August 20th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
What a bunch of arrogant, patronizing, head stuck up their asses, douches:
“Unfortunately, we’re not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows.
Trust us, as soon as we have a Mac version ready, it will be up and available on our site.”
Come on — I know this is a 2006 demo they are releasing. Surely in those two years they would have noticed IE on Windows doesn’t have a stranglehold on the web anymore.
No, I’m not bitter.
August 20th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Hey, I’m not bitter about it. Microsoft can do whatever they want with the software they write. I’m just disappointed I won’t get to try it.
@scoble - No can do. From their site: “Running Windows on a Mac? Photosynth runs under Boot Camp only. Parallels and other VM software cannot run the viewer.”
August 20th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
see comments like “Unfortunately, we’re not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really …” make them just come across like a bunch of fkucwtz. I mean really, who treats their customers this way.
I thought they are trying to get more and more photographers to use their products. With this sort of language I don’t think they are anywhere near close.
And what’s with the use of Flash on their homepage? I guess their agency is having a little problem in finding Silverlight developers? I wonder why?
August 20th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
“Trust us, as soon as we have a Mac version ready, it will be up and available on our site.”
Trust me… I am already bored…
August 20th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
No linux support either!! Bummer…
August 20th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Well, lets face it, we know that if it’s built by Microsoft then it’s going to have bugs. I certainly wouldn’t be releasing it on Mac if it were me. And I certainly wouldn’t be installing it either… for that same problem.
On the other hand… I’m a Mac “hater” (hahahaha…) and as most of the world runs on Microsoft, why bother offering something to the competition? Rather make them create their own or force the users to move. Isn’t that what the iPhone did?
Anyhow… it looks awesome and I can see that we could certainly make use of it in the future.
August 21st, 2008 at 12:16 am
So the ’synthing’ is done serverside and the app is just an uploader?
Anyhow, uploading is down because of serverload…
August 21st, 2008 at 12:25 am
Windows only. I wonder why I even bother visiting sites that are MS related.
August 21st, 2008 at 12:58 am
Downloading something from Microsoft… no way!
Last time I installed SQL Server and it screwed up my entire system…
August 21st, 2008 at 1:25 am
[...] fotografati. Se ne parla, tra l’altro, in maniera entusiastica su O’ Reilly Radar, Scobleizer, ecc… [per ora Photosynth funziona solo con Windows, in corso di rilascio la versione per [...]
August 21st, 2008 at 3:03 am
[...] technology on the Photosynth blog, or read some of the reviews that are popping up: Mossberg, Scoble, Webware, O’Reilly Radar, [...]
August 21st, 2008 at 4:29 am
[fe]Yeah, we all know that releasing an app that’s cross-platform is soooo easy. I mean, all–and I mean all–of those cool Mac apps are available for Windows users, too.
Right guys?[/fe]
August 21st, 2008 at 7:12 am
[...] "Demo of the Year" of 2006 Released by Microsoft (Robert Scoble) [...]
August 21st, 2008 at 8:11 am
Very cool - amazing detail… looking at your collection of magazines under coffee table. I see you have Direct TV too.
August 21st, 2008 at 8:56 am
Was a gee whiz cool toy in 2006, now it’s such is a commodity. A consumerish-focused Live Labs strategy-tax novelty toy being sent to the neverneverland of MSN. It’s doomed.
Going professional Enterprise appish and releasing the darn thing, instead of “synth” MSN.com buzzword happy, would have been a better route.
Abandonware all hope.
August 21st, 2008 at 9:02 am
Well, ok, Microsoft Live Spaces users (can’t we just deport them all?) will be the primary and only market. Cue up Dare with another round of misleading Enronish Web statistics, to show how super popular it “really” is.
August 22nd, 2008 at 12:19 am
“Unfortunately, we’re not cool enough to run on your OS yet.”
“Trust us, as soon as we have a Mac version ready…”
But I’m running Linux you dolts!
August 22nd, 2008 at 7:47 am
[...] tipped me off to the public launch of PhotoSynth. After 24 hours of trying (the PhotSynth server was overwhelmed for most of yesterday) I was [...]
August 22nd, 2008 at 8:33 am
“I know this is a 2006 demo they are releasing. Surely in those two years they would have noticed IE on Windows doesn’t have a stranglehold on the web anymore.”
It’s not restricted to IE, so I don’t know why you brought that into it.
LOL @ the Mac whiners. Apple makes plenty of stuff that only run on Macs, yet gets no criticism for it, in fact, Apple fanboys use that as a reason to advocate Mac use. Yet you guys whine about Microsoft or some other company making stuff for Windows only?
According the System Requirements, Photosynth is a *binary* plugin that makes heavy use of DirectX, which doesn’t exist on the Mac. And don’t tell that they should’ve written it using OpenGL. OpenGL is falling behind the times (OpenGL 3 is a joke), and why shouldn’t Microsoft use its own system API?
I’ve used Macs for years (much longer than Windows), but never have I seen a group of people more whiny and yet so smug than today’s Mac fanboys.
Note that I intentionally label the smug whiners as “Mac fanboys” to distinguish them from normal “Mac users”.
August 22nd, 2008 at 8:46 am
“So the ’synthing’ is done serverside and the app is just an uploader?”
According to the O’Reilly write up Scoble references, the synth is created on the client machine, so the app isn’t just an uploader.
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:28 am
*commercial starts, all white set fades in, boring Vista guy on the left with laptop… groovy Apple guy on the right looking over Vista guy’s shoulder*
Apple guy: Heya Vista, what you got goin on there?
Vista guy: I’m creating a new synth of the trip I took to Bora Bora using all the money I saved buying a Vista machine instead of a Mac Book Pro.
Apple guy: [sniff] I wish *I* could create a synth…
Vista guy: Oh, sorry Apple. There there, don’t cry. [reaffirming grip on Apple guy's shoulder] You’ll be able to create synths soon, we just need to port it to your platform and we’re working on it… [Vista guy turns to the camera] can we use Time Machine to get Apple back to being cool and smug?
*end commercial*