Slashgeo

Microsoft's Photosynth, previously on Slashgeo, is now available as a technology preview. From Very Spatial: "The Photosynth demos show you the point cloud that was generated for each photo collection, and then you can navigate around and see each photo in its referenced location and look at the 3D rendering of the photos. Even though it’s not even a beta yet, I just think it’s cool. Many, many possibilities come to mind again, of course, by linking Photosynth to a virtual globe, such as, let’s say, Virtual Earth 3D…" Spatially Adjusted offers screenshots.

SlashDot is currently running a discussion on another technology along the likes of Photosynth by Microsoft. To help you differentiate between the two, a co-author of the new tech wrote in one of his comments on SlashDot : "I also worked on the Photo Tourism project (which is related to Photosynth). There's a big difference between Photosynth and this new 3D reconstruction work, in that Photosynth takes a photo collection and reconstructs camera positions and a sparse point cloud (a set of disconnected 3D points floating in space), while in this new work we build *dense* 3D models of scenes (in the form of polygon meshes). Dense models are usually much better for use in applications like computer graphics, since they can be used to render scenes with much more photo-realism."

Here is SlashDot's summary : "The billion of images available from a site like Flickr has stimulated the imagination of many researchers. After designing tools using Flickr to edit your photos, another team at the University of Washington (UW) is using our vacation photos to create 3D models of world landmarks. But recreating original scenes is challenging because all the photos we put on Flickr and similar sites don't exhibit the same quality. With such a large number of pictures available, the researchers have been able to reconstruct with great accuracy virtual 3D model of landmarks, including Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Statue of Liberty in New York City."

The Google Earth Blog has an article up describing this new Google feature. From their summary : "In a move sure to draw comparisons with Microsoft's Photosynth, Google has released a new feature to Panoramio letting you "Look Around" at popular locations around the world. Panoramio is a photo uploading site which uniquely requires all photos to be geotagged when they are uploaded. There are over 5 million photos from Panoramio accessible through both Google Earth and now also available through Google Maps."

For more information and to view the youtube video, please visit the Google Earth Blog.

Yesterday Microsoft announced GeoSynth. From the press release [scroll previous link to the bottom of the entry]: "GeoSynth, currently a standalone application, is comprised of a Viewer and Collection Builder which provides the same incredible capabilities as Photosynth. Users who require offline processing, storage and access of Synths will now be able to use GeoSynth behind their firewalls, on private or classified networks, and on portable platforms. Ongoing development will permit standard geo-tagged photos to be used as input and allow generation of geodetically referenced 3D Synths which can be quantitatively analyzed and combined with other geospatial products. Accurate geo-positioning, using rigorous photogrammetric methodologies, is a fundamental objective of GeoSynth." See also our previous PhotoSynth stories below.

Microsoft announced you can now search for Photosynth photos directly in Virtual Earth. From the entry: "In the welcome pane, you’ll see a link for “Explore Collections” which you click and begin seeing all kinds of collections. You can then improve your search using a helpful toolbar based on tags, collections with photos, collections with 3D models, collections with MapCruncher layers, and collections with Photosynths! Additionally, you can sort these by relevance (if you input a search term), distance from the center of the map, date added and last updated. Click the Photosynth button and you’ll see a search result list of Photosynth collections." Some related Photosynth stories below. Photosynth.net requires MS Windows.

There was an article on CNET yesterday detailing the work done with Photosynth. : "Microsoft's Photosynth is an impressive tool for stitching together dozens of photos to allow a place or event to be viewed from multiple angles.

The only hard part is it really takes 75 photos or more to get the optimal experience. That's a lot of work for one photographer. But, with big events, one can also rely on crowdsourcing. Which is what CNN has done with the inaugural, asking viewers to send in their photos of Barack Obama's swearing in.

The resulting Photosynth is pretty cool. (It requires Silverlight for viewing.) "