How I Photosynth’d my family room
I just put up a Photosynth of my family room. Unfortunately you need a Windows machine to view it. But, this is a combination of 50 images I made this afternoon with my Canon 5D.
It took only a few minutes to upload them all and complete the Photosynth. Very easy to do. Anyone can do it, you just need to plan out your Photosynth a bit. Sort of like a big stitched panorama, except that people can “walk” through the images and zoom into different ones.
Can you find the photo of our 11-month-old son, Milan?
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August 20th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Yikes, an 8.2 MB download!
August 21st, 2008 at 12:08 am
great! I really like Photosynth, but i didn’t know you could make your own!
Adding one more thing to the list of things to do with my pictures…. HDR/panorama in HDview and Deep Zoom and now also Photosynth.. Thanks for the tip :)
August 21st, 2008 at 1:16 am
Well, colour me underwhelmed. I was expecting something a lot more fluid and integrated. The way the different photos seem hinged on axes and swing into view is very distracting, as is the way only a tiny fraction of the possible screen area is ever in focus. Zooming near the edge of a photo seam means that the existing data surrounding that photo fades away, even though the data is there, damn it, and the software could still show it.
Not impressed.
August 21st, 2008 at 1:29 am
Now, if it was capable of even 10% of something like this: http://www.vimeo.com/1513129 - I’d have been highly impressed.
August 21st, 2008 at 2:42 am
Barry: it’s still much better than anything else that I’ve seen out there. Can it be better? All technology can be better. But this lets me build photo scenes that are impossible to do with other technologies. I actually like that you see the individual tiles, because that lets you enjoy my photography as I made it — as individual photos.
August 21st, 2008 at 5:27 am
And that’s problem number one: you need Windows. Forget about it.
August 21st, 2008 at 6:30 am
No OS X support? Yawn.
August 21st, 2008 at 7:34 am
Found it twice, once on the floor by your wife and once by the TV on the floor right under the starting point.
I WIN.
August 21st, 2008 at 8:44 am
Isn’t that team going to be folded into Microsoft’s Virtual Earth mapping group soon? Thought I heard such from Mary Jo or other prezzies. So great, another piece of Microsoft freebie abandonware.
Does a good job I guess, if wrapped up in all that clunky strategy tax way that won’t see it used much more than a novelty, still use RealViz and PTGui Pro for daily use/needs however.
August 21st, 2008 at 9:59 am
[...] De eerste tekenen van het bestaan van Photosynth dateren terug tot November 2006, toen Gary Flakes in een kontschoppende demo aan Robert Scoble één van de eerste builds van Photosynth toonde. In de tussentijd is er flink gesleuteld aan de technologie, hebben een aantal personen hun mening kunnen geven binnen de tech preview en is het nu eindelijk beschikbaar voor iedereen om mee te spelen. Robert ging gelijk los op zijn woonkamer… [...]
August 21st, 2008 at 10:00 am
yeah. i have Photosynth but no idea how to use it
August 21st, 2008 at 10:49 am
Like a small startup, they’re displaying a message: “… site is a little overwhelmed”
August 21st, 2008 at 11:15 am
For those who think it should be on platforms other then Windows: Urge them to use Silverlight. Shouldn’t be that hard if they used .NET to develop this.
On my note, I would love to see the ability to use a video of an area as a Synth. I know it would be possible to upload each frame of say, an AVI, but adding this automatically would be nice… in any case, I’m working on a post about it on my Blog.
August 21st, 2008 at 11:46 am
You can use VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 2 to run Photosynth on a Mac: http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2008/08/microsoft-photo.html
August 21st, 2008 at 11:58 am
Cue up the Jerry Seinfeldish Photosynth infomercials.
Scary when it’s not arrogant to think that I (or the first 100 hundred names in the Chicago phonebook) can do better than the entire Microsoft Marketing Dept.
August 21st, 2008 at 1:25 pm
you single handedly took the site down!!! Now I have to imagine your photosynth does that make it a “virtual photosynth”
August 21st, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Can’t access the site!
August 21st, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Robert, you need to have two blogs or something. Your traffic keeps crashing sites.
August 21st, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Having to run it under Windows is a big Fail. Isn’t it a browser app? Telling people they need to load a beta version of VMWare, open Windows, just to see a fancy photo - not exactly a Killer App that’s going to inspire me.
LOL @ the new Windows message - Windows Not Walls.
Well in the shadow of that, MS release a “cool app” that only runs inside their Walled Garden.
MS should give the technology to SmugMug - or make it open - so people can get it running on other OS.
August 21st, 2008 at 4:31 pm
This would be nice for piecing together shots by different people (e.g. from Flickr).
For a scene such as your living room, wouldn’t traditional panorama “stitching” such as QuickTime VR be a lot simpler? You wouldn’t need as many photos (you could even do it with one photo and a cheap lens attachment), and the result is more fluid, with the whole scene in focus and smooth motion on all axes.
August 21st, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Nice to hear that! But failed to access that web default.aspx too. Am I going elsewhere?
August 21st, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Nate: It is similar to stitching but with a few differences. 1. The view can be from a variety of viewpoints, where traditional panorama stitching really assumes you are shooting from the same spot. 2. You can move in and out toward specific subjects to make them sharper. 3. You can shoot all around a building, say, and build that where panorama’s can’t deal with that. 4. All photos remain as you shot them, so I like it better for showing what I actually saw through my viewfinder and decided to shoot.
August 22nd, 2008 at 2:12 am
I finally got to see this synth. It loaded great, and Scoble: nice job! Cool to see what an non-synth-pro can do.
The blog seems down now though..
It is a pretty cool technology, it blows me away actually. I know they have also ported (parts of?) seadragon to silverlight for the deepzoom functionality, so it would be interesting to see a Silverlight version coming up.
August 22nd, 2008 at 4:21 am
I just don’t get it… why is it unfortunate that it only runs on Windows?? Is anybody saying “it is unfortunate that Aperture only runs on OSX”???
August 23rd, 2008 at 4:18 am
Hi! taking time to visit here. Visit me also if you have time. Thank you.
August 24th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
I still think it has a good way to go before it’s more than something for geeks to play with. Will say we have the same swing, they will put them to sleep in seconds…
September 16th, 2008 at 3:14 am
Mac OSX support is being pursued by Live Labs. They know where the photographers are. ;)
The current release is a bare bones gift to all the people who, like me, have been going crazy for the last two years wishing we could try it for ourselves. It is essentially still in beta and I couldn’t be happier to have it at my disposal.
The list of improvements that will be made to Photosynth in the coming months and years has no end in sight.
October 18th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Well as Far as the Photosynth goes, I’m sadly NOT IMPRESSED. After reading about it in Popular mechanics. I Thought It was going to be MUCH more Like the 360 stitched PANO Views I’m seeing so much more of today. I’m Not saying the Software isn’t useful or appealing to some, I Guess I just Expected more from Microsoft. The Overlapping of Photographs especially into a 3-D effect is A LOT Harder than Most people even realize.If Anyone would like to see some remarkable 360 panoramic AERIAL Shots, Checkout this link http://www.steamboataerials.com/. Those are pretty Breathtaking. Most are 5 or 6 shots taken from a Hovering RC Helicopter, OR an Aerial BOOM pole. This IS A QUICKTIME Application, So pretty much anyone can view these. I CANT Find the Other Site, But there is Another setup that allows Zooming in and out as well as 360 degree.