An amazing product has emerged from Microsoft’s Live Labs. Photosynth allows anyone to create an immersible and interactive experience given just a set of digital photographs of an area. I’ll just warn up front that this is a Windows only product at this point, but its novelty more than justifies the download and installation.
Photosynth screen capture showing the Asian Gallery at the IMA
As you read on, you’ll probably discover that I had way too much fun with this tool, and I hope you will as well.
I tried three separate experiments.
#1: Staged Photography
First, I asked Mike Rippy, from our photography department, to shoot a variety of overview and detail shots of a portion of our Asian Galleries. These images all have consistent lighting and were shot using a tripod, so they are extremely sharp. The image above shows a case of works, and the faint white box is indicating that a more detailed image was shot at that point. Photosynth does the best it can to “automagically” stitch together photographs of the same region even if they were shot at different angles. For the most part it did an amazing job.
Zoom Detail Example
In the image above I am showing two captures of the same view in Photosynth. On the left half you see the overview of a hanging scroll. As you zoom in with your mousewheel, more and more detail comes to life as seen the in right half. This ability to see pristine detail on works of art is very seldom seen.
Automatic Object VR
Another reason I see this tool as taking panoramic tools to the next level is its automatic object vr detection. When taking pictures of a 3D work from multiple angles, Photosynth displays the “donut” control above. You can grab and turn the object, and new images page in and out to give the feeling that you are spinning the work in space.
#2: The Mob
As a second test I asked a group of people to help me raid the European Galleries. About a dozen people took 30 minutes to shoot over 1400 images of the space. The point of this test was to see if Photosynth could handle photographs from a wide variety of cameras. They ranged from your $100 point-and-shoot to your $1000 digital SLR. For the most part it handled the task fairly well. The final product, which I link to below, consisted of about half of the images due to the large amount of time it took to create.
#3: Nature
Finally I shot a more traditional panorama in the 100 Acres. Photosynth did a really good job stitching these photos together as well. I thought the complexity of nature might pose a difficult task.
100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park
The Results:
You can see all three of the Photosynth’s I created at these links:
Did I mention they are embeddable?
October 14th, 2008 at 8:40 am
These look great! I’m sure a final release will be cross-platform… and if that’s the case, this should be a very useful and cheap tool for museums to use for delivering multimedia experiences.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Being from Indy, I thought I might say another option exists.
360 product photography
http://www.photospherix.com
February 10th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Exciting!
May 20th, 2009 at 9:02 am
Nice experiments
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