Photosynth – Stitching the world together
I was recently pointed towards a new Microsoft project by a friend of mine, its called photosynth, and its just gone public on Microsoft Live Labs.
Essentially its a system for ’stitching’ digital photographs together to make 3d representations from the 2d images. It uses a system of ‘point recognition’, wherby it analyses each picture and looks for similarities between them. These reference points are used to generate a 3d ‘points cloud’ to which the 2d images are overlaid.
Enough of the techie talk, photosynth is really cool! Its also very easy to use.
Once signed up (you need a Windows Live ID), you download a browser, plugin and a application for your PC. You then take some pictures, making sure theres an overlap of about a third with each one, then dump them into the software and press synth! A short while later, your synth has been created and is viewable online for the whole world to admire.
Depending on how well you’ve taken your photos, your creation will be given a ’synthy percentage’. The higher the percentage the more of your images were used and the more ’synthy’ it is.
Anyway, heres a link to a couple of my better ones, enjoy.
Robin Hill – King Henry VIII’s Hunting Lodge
Tags: live id, live labs, Microsoft, photosynth, points cloud, synthy, Windows Posted in