The Future of Photos
A couple months ago, I watched a preview on a new 3D photo visualization tool from Microsoft’s live labs crew. The following presentation took place at TED:
After watching the video, I remained somewhat skeptical. My biggest contention was that it just would not work (conveniently) within the current web paradigm. The vision algorithms and processing required to create these 3D models seemed to be a fairly insurmountable hurdle for any substantially large system. However, after visiting the MS live labs Photosynth site few days ago, I am now convinced that this technology may change the way we use photos.
Just the other day I uploaded numerous pictures of my new apartment for friends and family. Flickr is a great tool for photo sharing, but Photosynth could drastically improve the experience by translating those apartment pictures into a virtual 3D tour. Photosynth could potentially replace some types of 3D immersion tools altogether. Using technologies similar to Fotowoosh, outdoor photos can be converted into 3D textures which could then be mapped back into the Photosynth data set and render a fully textured 3D model.
In keeping with the subject matter of this website, I hesitated on posting this topic because it’s too new to have any apparent legal controversies right now. Perhaps some privacy concerns or copyright issues will arise in the future. I suppose we will find out what the legal ramifications are when Microsoft develops a business model for this technology. In the meantime, if you are on a Windows machine, go check out the demo and videos on the Photosynth site. You will have to install an Active X object if you want to try the demo, but it’s fairly painless and well worth it.
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