I wanted to share with you some information on Photosynth, a new technology developed by Live Labs, Microsoft Research, and the University of Washington, to create a unique and immersive three dimensional online photo sharing experience for consumers. Below is some additional information on this exciting technology. A video preview of Photosynth and screen shots can be found here. The technology will be made available for download later this year.

• Photosynth enables people to combine their photos with thousands of others collected on the Internet to present a detailed 3D model of a subject, giving viewers the sensation of smoothly gliding around the scene from every angle. It’s like a hybrid of a slide show and a gaming experience that lets the viewer zoom in to see greater detail or zoom out for a more expansive view that lets people interact with photos in a 3D context that more closely resembles the place where they were captured.

• This is the first prototype to come out of Microsoft Live Labs which was formed in January 2006 as a partnership between Microsoft Research and Microsoft’s Online Services Group to rapidly launch new inventions and emerging technologies.
• Photosynth started as a collaborative research project called “Photo Tourism” between Microsoft Research and the University of Washington. This research combined both new and established techniques in computer vision; image-based modeling and rendering; image browsing, retrieval and annotation; and keypoint detection and matching to present unstructured collections of photos in a three-dimensional perspective. Information about the research and science behind Photosynth can be found here.
• Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington will present the paper “Photo Tourism: Exploring Photo Collections in 3D” at the 2006 ACM SIGGRAPH conference next week. SIGGRAPH is the leading professional society for computer graphics and interactive techniques. Roughly 25,000 people are expected to attend the annual event.

[Jim Pinter]

[tags]photosynth,live labs,microsoft research,university of washington,microsoft’s online services group[/tags]