Wow. Very Short List has helped me discover this week's mind-boggling e-toy. The award goes to Microsoft Live Labs, which have developed a new technology called Photosynth. The application, as its creators put it, "takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space."
What does this mean? It means you can zoom around a 3-D model of, say, the Piazza San Pietro in Rome, constructed entirely from disparate user images. One model in the demo video here utilized images from a Flickr photoset. One envisions a future in which one can explore nearly any place documented by any number of photographers in 3-D. Suddenly, taking 500 digital images on a vacation seems a little less excessive.
Photosynth is basically an intermingling of two technologies. The first is Seadragon, a recent acquisition of Microsoft's. It enables you to view and manipulate photos independent of their resolutions. This means you can zoom and otherwise move around an image of enormous file size as if it were a tiny pixilated jpeg.
Add to that an algorithm that detects similarities in a set of photos, such as architectural detailing on an archway, and arranges all the photos in a 3-D space, and you've got Photosynth. Rick Szeliski, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft featured in this making-of video envisions this in the long-term as an entirely new visual medium. At the very least, your friends would appreciate a quick 3-D stroll around the Great Wall more than a 500-frame slideshow.
The fine print? Currently, Photosynth is limited to Windows users (and those of you with Mac hardware will still require Direct3D acceleration), and its collections are limited to those available here.
