LiveSide - News blog : PhotoSynth

Photosynth: Overhead View And More

Sunshine — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:26:00 GMT

The Photosynth team has released a major new feature called Overhead View. Overhead View allows you to look at the synth from above in 3D points. It also offers a new way of navigation, which is particularly handy for larger area synths. On hover it will show you pictures covering that region and clicking will get you a great transition into the 3D experience starting with that photo! Very cool, isn’t it?

Now I could put some pictures here of the feature, but it’s better explained in a video, so here’s a small video the team made to show off this feature.

Besides this major new feature, there are more improvements. Here are the highlights:
· An all-new, Silverlight-3 based viewer
· The “View” button on the synther now automatically logs you in to the Web site and takes you directly into the editor so that you can complete title/description, and give your synth highlights and a geotag.
· Geotagging is now easier and you can even scale and rotate your synth in the map in a process called “geoalignment”
· Multiword search improvements

If you would like to let the team know what you think you can do so by leaving a comment on their post or on their forum.

WorldWide Telescope And Photosynth In Time’s 50 Best Websites List For 2009

Sunshine — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:50:15 GMT

WorldWide Telescope and Photosynth, have been named to Time's 50 Best Websites list for 2009.

[click on the image to go to the page]

Very nice considering these sites are still fairly new, Photosynth just turned one and the Worldwide Telescope web client has only been available since March 2009! WWT itself went public in May 2008. Both technologies came out of Microsoft Research.

Congratulations!

Previous WorldWide Telescope articles
Previous Photosynth articles

Photosynth Turns One Year Old

Sunshine — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:16:25 GMT

It’s been over a year since Photosynth.net launched. The team has written a massive article with the highlights of this past year. Now we’re not going to put them all here, for that you can read their article, but here are some statistics:

422,508	synths created
15,880,950	photos synthed and uploaded
15,541,978,306	3D points in all point clouds combined (15.6 billion)
26,445,915,945,733,700	number of floating point operations performed in all computations (26 quadrillion)
8,979,357,357	peak simultaneous FLOPs of all computations (8.9 GigaFLOPs)
472,000	peak synths viewed per day

Figures are accurate to within a few percent, with the exception of the FLOPs number which is only accurate to an order of magnitude.

So what’s in store for the future? The team is working on a Silverlight 3-based viewer that will be released in the fall. This promises even greater quality when viewing! There also will be integration with Bing Maps:

Our commercial Photosynth licensing announcement in May confirmed what was rumored before -- that Photosynth had graduated out of Live Labs to become part of Virtual Earth. For individuals and businesses, synths are becoming an important way to document the places they care about. Those places all live on a map, and what our customers have been asking for is to make this connection both obvious and magical. We're working on it!

Besides these two they have a whole laundry list of feature ideas the community has been asking for. One of them is to make synth viewing a more understandable, easier to use, experience. Now how they are going to make it even more easy is beyond us, but hey we’ll see…

From us here at LiveSide: Happy Birthday Photosynth!

Previous articles about Photosynth

Publish Your Photosynth To Facebook

Sunshine — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:10:58 GMT

So you got good at creating Photosynths. To share you can send the link to your friends or embed it into your blog but now there is one more: MySynth, a new Facebook app that publishes Photosynths right onto your Facebook profile page.

After you’ve added the application you can go ahead to the MySynth application page and fill out the form.

Title: the name you wish to give the Synth.
Source URL: the URL of the Synth taken from the address bar or from the embed code of the synth.
Thumbnail Image URL: the URl of the thumbnail.
This is not so obvious. Where do you find the thumbnail and its URL? You can find this by going to the user’s collection of Synths, right click the thumbnail of the Synth you wish to use and choose properties. Copy that URL.
Thumbnail Description: a short description that will be shown next to the thumbnail on publishing
Long description: will be displayed in the Synth view.
Location: where the Synth is taken.
More info URL: URL for linking to a page with more info on the URL. Example: website of the owner. this will be shown at the end of the long description.

Now make sure the checkboxes you want are checked and grant permission for Feed Publishing by clicking the link beside that checkbox, if you want it to be published to the feed. Done, click Add Synth.

Should you wish to edit or remove the Synth later, just go to the application page and click on the View/Edit Synths tab. This app can also publish Synths of others to your Facebook page if you want to share a nice one you saw.

MySynth is created by Speaktech and uses the latest cloud service features in Microsoft Azure for storage.

Source: Publish Your Photosynth to Facebook - Bing Maps Blog - Bing Community

Photosynth Gets A Whole New Look And A Few Improvements

Sunshine — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:11:03 GMT

I don’t know what it is with the Photosynth Blog feed, but this one just turned up today, whilst the date on the post says May 21st… Anyways old news or not, to me and to most of you it will be new news so here it is:

Photosynth has a Whole New Look

The green Photosynth theme is still there, but the content has been made easier to read (dark background etc.). The new homepage now has a full viewer on it so you can directly explore the latest favorite synths.

Below it 6 other synths are featured in the form of tradecards. These tradecards, which you will find throughout the site, contain the Favorite count, Comment count and geotag icon as well as the name of the synth, the author and the upload date.

The Search on the site has also been improved. You can not only search on keyword but you can also sort them on Best Match, Best Synth, Date Added, Number of Views or on author (Created By).

Along with these very visible changes the site got a lot of little bug fixes, tweaks and general improvements.

Initial Synth Visibility Setting

Point clouds are cool, but sometimes you may not want them them to show by default when your synth loads. Or maybe you want to show off just the points on Initial view! Now you get to choose if you want to show Images and Points, Only Points or Only Images on Initial Visibility. You can get to this setting by logging in and viewing any of your own synths.

There is a Edit Synth and Highlights button that will take you to the edit page when clicked. Happy Synthing!

Previous Photosynth articles

Virtual Earth / PhotoSynth integration announced

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:32:20 GMT

Remember back last March when we told you about Virtual Earth/PhotoSynth integration via GeoSynth? A UK blog, PocketLint, posted a story we picked up on the integration, allowing public Photosynths to be embedded in Virtual Earth maps. Well now, according to Travel website Travolution, the new service is being announced today:

The announcement today will give website owners the ability to place PhotoSynth applications into their own embedded maps, using either their own imagery or drawing from existing photos in the PhotoSynth library.

Microsoft is hoping the new functionality will appeal to hotels and other travel destination services such as tourist boards and DMOs.

Photosynth is a cutting edge imaging system developed by Microsoft over the past two years which allows users to navigate around a location in three dimensions using a myriad of different photos.

The system has resided within the Microsoft Live Labs beta test platform until now but will now be publicly available across the web within the Virtual Earth environment.

You can hear more about the announcements on the Virtual Earth News page. Along with the Virtual Earth integration, PhotoSynth will feature the ability to set your Synths as “unlisted”, so they will not show up in any index, the use of a Silverlight viewer, and the introduction of “highlights”, or marked places in the Synth that can be quickly accessed via a sidebar in the viewer. The Synths can then be embedded in Virtual Earth via an iFrame, accessible through the PhotoSynth.

While the Virtual Earth integration isn’t quite the Street View killer we and Pocket Lint had envisioned as it won’t be available in Live Search Maps, it will be available for anyone using Virtual Earth, although with restrictions, according to the Travolution post:

Matthew Quinlan, group product manager for Enterprise Mapping at Microsoft, told Travolution the integration of public ‘synths’ into an existing map will be free for website owners but commercial organisations will have to pay if they go over a limit for the number of unlisted photos used.

Currently only public photos loaded into PhotoSynth system will be available for the synths, Quinlan said.

“The big barrier for taking from something like Flickr at the moment is respecting other people’s copyright,” he admitted.

More info in the Press Release.

Photosynth Experimental Viewer Now Main Viewer For Photosynth

Sunshine — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:24:51 GMT

Some news we’ve missed out on: Photosynth got updated again. The experimental Silverlight viewer has now become the main Photosynth viewer. This means that not only PC users, but also Mac users can view the synths, comment and mark them favorite. The embedding code has also been moved over to Silverlight.

The viewer controls got updated. Based on your feedback and support all the navigation buttons are now in the center bottom of the viewer:

The Halos (or Donuts) that were shown when there was an object that can be rotated around has a different visual icon in the new viewer too.

And that’s not all, you can now add highlights to your synth. So those watching your synth will not miss out on the best spots! How?
- Click Edit Synth and Highlights (in the right info area for your synth)
- Find A Great Photo (Optional: Give it a Title & Caption) - Click Add Highlight
- Find Another Great Photo… repeat.
- Click Save
Now on the right of your Synth you will see a bar with the highlights:

Clicking on them will fly you straight to that highlight, how cool is that?
Some more examples: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Martello Tower: Inside & Out

This move in viewer does come with a downside though: a step back in performance because of the lower frame rate and delayed point cloud density… but the team is working hard on improving performance so that the Silverlight viewer can not only be more feature rich than the D3D viewer but be equally high performance if not better. You can still view synths with the old Direct3D viewer btw, just click “View Synth in Direct3D Viewer” at the bottom left of the viewer area on any synth page.

Another new feature is that you can now upload your synths without making it public. Ideal for fine tuning your Synths before sharing them.

GeoSynth: Microsoft’s answer to Google Street View?

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:22:00 GMT

Pocket-lint, the “largest independent gadget news and reviews site in the UK”, is reporting today that Microsoft plans to take on Google’s Street View with a “public-led” offering based on PhotoSynth technology and Silverlight to “allow users to upload geotagged images into a central database to help build detailed larger images of a given landmark” to be “connected into Microsoft's Virtual Earth service allowing you to get a "street view" of anywhere on the planet”, according to the post on Pocket-lint.

The yet-to-be-announced new technology is apparently awaiting Virtual Earth working with Silverlight, which was announced at Mix09 last week, and is set to go into beta this summer, with a full release later this year.

Pocket-lint talked to Johannes Kebeck, a Virtual Earth technology specialist at Microsoft EMEA about the project:

"The system would take the best images from a location to create a single image of a specific landmark very much in the same way Microsoft did with the Obama Inauguration", Johannes Kebeck a Virtual Earth technology specialist at Microsoft EMEA told us.
"We couldn't guarantee that all images would be used, but you could create a very good image of a given landmark like Piccadilly Circus for example from thousands of images".

While there have been sightings of Microsoft vehicles taking what appeared to be Street View type images, and at one point a technology preview of a Street View type product was released by Microsoft, up to this point there has been no indication of how Microsoft and Virtual Earth / Live Maps planned to answer Google’s popular Street View feature.

via FastCompany

PhotoSynth Launches For IPhone

Sunshine — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:09:23 GMT

I’m sure by now we all know what Photosynth is. Some of you have already played around with it too, I know we did! CNN News did too, creating a synth of Obama’s Inauguration from pictures the public emailed to them. Synths are everywhere, they are on Live Search Maps and there’s even a Photosynth Explore Map where you can watch all geotagged synths on a Virtual Earth Map. Everybody can make a synth, even though making a high percentage synthing synth takes some practice.

And now the big news: iPhone and iPod Touch owners can now also enjoy synths on their devices.

This is possible with the new iPhone application iSynth that was released yesterday in the iTunes App Store. In the application there are buttons for most recent, most viewed and '”nice and synthy” (high percentage synthy). Besides that you can also search for synths using keywords. Clicking on a synth first gives you a brief description of the image including number of views, number of photos used, date, percentage “synthy,” and a thumbnail from the image. You can then press the “View Synth!” to watch the full synth. Everything works the same as on you computer, even Point Clouds is working! Just one thing you can’t do though: you can’t make a synth from pictures on your iPhone or iPod Touch, it’s only a viewer. So to create synth you will still need your Mac or PC, but hey, once you made your synth you can show them off to your friends using your iPhone!

iSynth was developed by Greg Pascale with permission from Microsoft. Greg was an intern on the Photosynth team during the summer of 2008. iSynth isn’t a Microsoft product nor is it officially supported by Microsoft. Greg will provide his own support via GetSatisfaction.

Edit: Thanks to Picturepan2, we now have some screenshots of iSynth in action:

Very nice, thanks PicturePan2! He also told me there’s PhotoSynth capability in the Seadragon app for iPhone too, I forgot all about that one. He has some screenshots up of that one over at Livesino.net.

Geoffrey Emery - PhotoSynth Launches for IPhone
Previous PhotoSynth articles

Photosynth Map Explore, See The World Through Synths

Sunshine — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:08:31 GMT

Nathan of the Photosynth Team created an Explore Map so you can see all geotagged synths. Sightseeing on a Map! Awesome, let’s have a look how this works.

When we go to the Explore Map, we start off with this screen:

Now that’s a whole lot of synths packed together isn’t it. Let’s zoom in (scroll wheel):

Now that’s better, but what’s with all them numbers on the leaves? Those numbers tell you how many synths there are in that area:

If it is a single leaf a mini Photosynth viewer gets launched when you move your mouse over it. Let’s look at one that was taken pretty recently (January):

[no, this is not my synth]

Ice skating on the lakes here this Winter! You can view the whole in the mini viewer or click on the synth’s name and go to the full one.

I’m absolutely loving this explore map, don’t you? Go check it out here! Want your (Holiday) pictures to appear on this new map too? Geotag your synths.

How To Geotag Your Synths

After you’ve created your synth, go to your synth and click the globe you see at bottom right:

Next, on the Virtual Earth map, move to where you took your pictures (synth) and click on the map. Then click Save and your synth will be geotagged!

Photosynth Blog : Photosynth Map Explore: See the World Through Synths

Photosynth Update: New Features & Improvements

Sunshine — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 10:42:02 GMT

The Photosynth experience has been improved. New features an improvements launched and even more are in the works. The team promises more Photosynth goodness in the coming weeks. We’ll be watching!

The features/improvements already launched are:

- Point Clouds in Silverlight Viewer
Along with things like better object rotation and bug fixes, the Point cloud is now working in the Silverlight Viewer.

Take a look at the Silverlight Viewer here. (Press P to switch the viewer into point cloud mode)
- Homepage Updates
There are two new icons to help you easily get to the Forum and Blog.

You can also now find links to the blog and forum in the main navigation in the upper right corner of the page and the latest blog post title will show up in the bar below the big icons on the homepage.
- Your Activity Area
You could already see the latest comments on your synths but now you can also see which synths you commented on and if people have replied to your comments. See if anyone has replied to your comments!
- More Explore Views
You can now filter Top Favorites and Most Viewed synths on last 7 days, 30 days or all time. Explore the latest great synths.
- Discussion Forum
Share your ideas and get inspiration at the newly added Photosynth Forum.

The Help & Support site will continue to exists, so you can go there for help too. On top of that a new contact page has been created. Sounds like plenty of ways to get help/leave feedback to me!

Capturing “the moment” with Photosynth: Barack Obama takes the Oath of Office

Kip Kniskern — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:12:50 GMT

On Tuesday, January 20th, Barack Obama will be sworn in as President of the United States in front of the US Capitol in Washington DC, and in front of an estimated 2-5 million witnesses. To capture the moment, CNN News is planning to create a Photosynth of Obama’s swearing in, in what in itself will be a momentous use of Photosynth.

The Photosynth blog has details:

Capturing the Moment of Transition

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.

How it Will Work

We’ll take your photos from every angle, combine them with CNN’s professional shots, and produce what we hope will be an amazing experience that will be shown live on CNN. And you thought the Jessica Yellin hologram was cool! The synth will also be available for everyone to see on CNN.com.

How to Participate

When you make a Photosynth on your own, you shoot tens or hundreds of photos from different positions. Since we hope to have thousands of people participating, we’re asking to just capture the view from one position.

If you have a…

Camera Phone. Take one photo of the moment when the President Elect raises his hand to take the Oath, and email it as soon as you can to cnnmoment@live.com. Don’t worry if he’s too small to see clearly in your photo. As long as you get the Capitol building in your shot it will synth in and help reconstruct the environment.

Digital Camera. Take three photos (wide-angle, mid-zoom, full-zoom) of the President Elect while he is being sworn in. As soon as you can get to an Internet connection, email them to us at cnnmoment@live.com. Make sure your email message is less than 10MB in size. Break it into a couple of messages if your three photos combine to more than 10MB.

We’d love to give you credit in the synth, so include your name in the email if you’d like it to appear in the list of contributors.

Don’t worry if you won’t be one of the possible million people in attendance... we're working on some ways to showcase your inauguration synths from around the D.C. area... and the world. Stay tuned for more information on synthing your inauguration celebrations and events.

So even if you’re not in Washington on Tuesday, capture your inauguration moment and we’ll keep you posted on how you’ll be able to join in the festivities.

Photosynth Experimental Silverlight Viewer, View Synths On Any Computer

Sunshine — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:11:00 GMT

The current (high performance) Photosynth viewing experience uses a technology called Direct 3D, and makes sophisticated use of the graphics hardware on your computer. This approach has its advantages and disadvantages. If you have a recent Windows PC with up to date graphics drivers you’ll have a great experience, and you’ll be able to view synths with buttery smoothness. But lots of people have older PCs and others have Macs, and none of these folks could view synths before now. Not anymore, now there’s the Silverlight powered experimental viewer!

Silverlight is cross-platform (PC and Mac) and works on most old machines as well as all new ones. This generality comes at a price though, and for now Photosynth’s Silverlight experience is a couple of steps behind the Direct 3D one. But hey at least now you can look at all those pretty synths too! Most of what’s in the Direct 3D viewer is also in this Silverlight viewer, Seadragon aka Deep Zoom is in it and isn’t that the one of the most important parts? What’s not in it are the point clouds:

Point clouds will be added to it later on, when the team finds a reasonable way to do so. See they are not forgetting about all you Mac users and those who aren’t so fortunate to have a capable computer! Nice huh?

More info about this new viewer can be found at the about page.

How do you view another synth in this viewer? Easy: right-click a synth thumbnail on the site, copy the URL and paste it into the box below the synth you are currently viewing, or just hit the Photosynth button to view a featured synth.

http://photosynth.net
Photosynth Experimental Silverlight Viewer
Photosynth Blog

Photosynth comes to Live Search Maps

damaster — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:46:23 GMT

We mentioned previously that the Photosynth team has officially moved into the Virtual Earth Product Group. Today, Sarah Perez on Channel 10 pointed out that Photosynth is now officially integrated with Live Search Maps. Here’s an excerpt:

As you navigate in a map or zoom in or out in a particular location in Live Maps, you can choose to display pushpins for each Photosynth available in that area. You then just click the “launch Photosynth viewer” link to dive in and start exploring those synths.

You can try this now in Seattle, in Cairo at the Sphinx, in Vatican city, or at the Leaning tower of Pisa, for example.

Here are the steps that allow you to find this feature in Live Search Maps, we’ll use the Leaning Tower of Pisa as an example here:

Go to Live Search Maps and navigate to any location where synths may be available, try “Paris”
Go to Collections > Explore collections to turn on Explore mode and view all user-generated content on Live Search Maps.
On the left pane, click on the Photosynth button to filter out to display just synths, as shown below:
You should find a list of the synths available at the location, with the corresponding numbers displayed on the Virtual Earth map. Click on Click to Launch Photosynth Viewer to open the synth.
Enjoy!

Photosynth Wins Breakthrough Award

ScottIsAFool — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:23:55 GMT

The Photosynth blog has posted that they are one of 10 winners of the Popular Mechanics Magazine’s Top 10 Most Brilliant Gadgets of the Year. Photosynth was released in August and since then has won a lot of praise across the web.

Just as a reminder of what Photosynth is, I have embedded below a Photosynth I did of a British Red Arrow

And also, don’t forget to check out Sunshine’s original review of Photosynth as well as all our other posts about it. So congratulations to all those on the Photosynth team, keep up the good work.