Photosynth for Windows

Photosynth for Windows is officially released from the Microsoft Live Labs, and launched as a fully-working public web app. Sign up to get a free 20Gb of storage to host your synths — which you’ll need, since each synth is best made from between 50 to 300 photos.

http://livelabs.com/photosynth/

О проекте:

Imagine being able to share the places and things you love using the cinematic quality of a movie, the control of a video game, and the mind-blowing detail of the real world. With nothing more than a bunch of photos, Photosynth creates an amazing new experience.

How does it work?

Photosynth is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs: the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet.

Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point the photos were taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.

Providing that experience requires viewing a LOT of data though—much more than you generally get at any one time by surfing someone’s photo album on the web. That’s where our Seadragon™ technology comes in: delivering just the pixels you need, exactly when you need them. It allows you to browse through dozens of 5, 10, or 100(!) megapixel photos effortlessly, without fiddling with a bunch of thumbnails and waiting around for everything to load.

http://photosynth.net/about.aspx

How to Synth

Creating a synth is easy, fun, and different from how you may have been using your digital camera in the past. We have a downloadable video that explains the process:

http://photosynth.net/about.aspx#howto

http://photosynth.net/documentation/Pho ... v6b_CC.pdf

http://photosynth.net/explore.aspx

Photosynth Crashes, Burns, Rises Again!

If you read our story yesterday about Microsoft's free Photosynth 3D Panorama image software, you might have been anxious to try it out yourself. Yes, you and about 20 million other people, it turns out.

After it was launched yesterday, Photosynth immediately went on the fritz when its servers were quickly overwhelmed with users. Yes, you would've thought Microsoft would've anticipated this but they apparently didn't. Though TechCrunch did detect a certain amount of cheeriness in a blog entry from Microsoft's Photsynth team that appeared during yesterday's server meltdown:

"Getting ready for the launch we did massive amounts of performance testing, built capacity model after capacity model, and yet with all of that, you threw so much traffic our way that we need to add more capacity. We are adding that extra horsepower right now and should be back up shortly.

Thank you for the incredible reception!"

http://www.pdnpulse.com/2008/08/photosynth-cras.html