Dhruv Parashar

8/2/2006

The future of Photo Galleries

I came across a Photo and Imaging product Microsoft Live Labs have been working in Microsoft and the University of Washington based on the groundbreaking research of Noah Snavely (UW), Steve Seitz (UW), and Richard Szeliski (Microsoft Research).

Its called PhotoSynth and is ment to revolutionarise the way we look at and interact with photos. Simply Photosynth analyzes a large collection of photos using computer vision algorithms and extracts similarities in them. Then it constructs a visual 3-D space. According to its official website

"Photosynth you can:

walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle;
seamlessly zoom in or out of a photograph even if it's gigapixels in size;
see where pictures were taken in relation to one another;
find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing;
explore a custom tour or see where you’ve been; or
send a collection to a friend."

....Read More

There are also couple of very interesting videos. This product is still not released and updates are available on the Team Blog. Some images from the site are below.

Update: Photosynth is now available !!

To install photosynth click here