Microsoft Live Labs - SIGGRAPH 2006 and a quick update on Photosynth

August 17, 2006

SIGGRAPH 2006 and a quick update on Photosynth

Hi folks, it’s been a few weeks since we announced Photosynth at SIGGRAPH 2006 and we thought it might be useful to give you a quick update on what we’re up to.

Firstly, we’ve been overwhelmed with the positive responses in the blogosphere and mainstream press, with coverage including the BBC and CNET as well as Digg, Slashdot and Motley Fool. Live Labs is a small, new team at Microsoft and it’s gratifying to see that the online community shares our vision for the potential of Photosynth. One of the things we felt got a little lost in all the news was that Photosynth was born out of a deep collaboration between Rick Szeliski at Microsoft Research, Noah Snavely and Steve Seitz of the University of Washington. Noah and Steve continue to be deeply involved in helping us evolve Photosynth and exemplify the kind of cross collaboration with academia that we aspire to continue at Live Labs. You can read a lot more about their work at the Photo Tourism site.

Siggraph was a blast! We had the chance to meet hundreds of graphics professionals and enthusiasts and hear their reactions to Photosynth first hand. Rick, Noah and Steve’s presentation of "Photo tourism: Exploring photo collections in 3D" was extremely well received and we’ve been inundated with requests from people with various different applications of the Photosynth Technology.

One of the questions we’re often asked is when people will be able to create their own 3D collections. This is something we’re absolutely committed to but will not be available in our first external release. Photosynth currently requires a large number of CPU cycles to perform the matching between images and for larger datasets this can take hours or sometimes days of processing. We are exploring a number of methods for drastically reducing this processing time but want to ensure that people realize that we’re a technology that is evolving in real-time and we want to incrementally build towards the vision of a world of interconnected images through collaboration and participation from the online community.

To that end we will be releasing an ActiveX browser control this fall that will allow you to explore a number of interesting, processed collections. We showed an early build of this at our SIGGRAPH booth and many people gave us feedback on the interface that we’re currently incorporating. This build will also include the amazing multi-resolution, zoom and navigation capabilities of SeaDragon which is an experience unto itself!

So that’s all for now, stay tuned for updates from myself and some of the other folks on the team in the weeks to come and thanks again for stopping by!

Adam Sheppard
Group Manager
Microsoft Live Labs.

Announcements

Comments [40] | Permalink | E-mail this | Digg this

8/29/2006 1:50:40 AM UTC

Sounds amazing! I am really excited for the release. Do you think that you could also make it so you are able to navigate inside buildings such as malls and theaters. That would be very neat also. And when do you expect the release?

Posted by: Brian

8/31/2006 3:50:11 PM UTC

I'd love to be able to create my own collections regardless of processing time. Rendering anything takes lot's of time I would be very willing to test it out with some of my collections and let it process for days :) Regardless of what you all release, I'll be eagerly awaiting any further development.

Posted by: Robert |robirtnelsonAT NOSPAMgmail dot com

9/3/2006 2:25:14 AM UTC

Any chance of getting my hands on a beta?

Posted by: jeremy |j_pcmanAT NOSPAMinbox dot com

9/3/2006 8:15:21 AM UTC

I downloaded the little promotional film where you guys demonstrate some of the current functions of Photosynth and let loose some of your aspirations towards what you could see this technology turn into.

What I find quite peculiar is what Gary Flake had to say, in particular:

"Photosynth is also a really great story in terms of how lots of different teams can come together and in a short period of time do something that's really ground-breaking.

It would not have been possible without participation from MSR, from the Pix team (sp?), the University of Washington, from Virtual Earth - all of these different teams were instrumental in being able to produce the technology preview that we have today."

This sort of collaboration is definitely very cool, showing as we can see some pretty ground-breaking results, and no doubt extremely exciting to be involved in! However, if other groups such as the University of Washington is involved what I would not like to see is that Microsoft then takes the great work that you guys have been doing with 'instrumental' help from these other groups such that Photosynth would not exist without their participation, and licenses it all as proprietary and slaps a massive price tag on it.

Furthermore it would be brilliant to see a ground-breaking technology like this make use of open standards. I believe that anyone with a camera should be able to participate in the construction of a global pictorial index of the world.

Denying those who choose not to purchase Microsoft Windows and Photosynth access to something like this is the worst that could happen. Given that this global database could only exist with the input of the public itself I think it is instrumental to allow the public to use and access this (really awesome!) new technolgy through open standards. That way an open source/free software client could also exist--and you guys don't have to code it if you release specs.

I guess this is sort of a challenge to you talented guys as well. If you have been having fun working on something like this thus far with input from a university and several other groups then consider how awesome Photosynth could be if that talented hacker in Virginia or even Bangladesh or Beijing could take a look at what you guys have been so diligently working on and offer their help knowing that people would be free to share Photosynth for all. :)

Awesome work - keep it up.

PS. Oh and you guys have a very cool jelly-bean jar. ;)

Posted by: Pascal Klein |mokuiasAT NOSPAMgmail dot com

9/5/2006 2:06:49 PM UTC

Hi folks,
Photosynth looks amazing. I had a thought for extending the technology that I'm hoping has already been considered.

Essentially, why stop at photos. How about creating a "Videosynth" application that does for videos what Photosynth does for still photos. If you think about it, video is merely 30 still photos per second.

Also, an "Audiosynth" for me as a musician and lover of music. Being able to find and link audio streams with millions or billions of other audio streams would also be cool. I'm not sure how this should be represented (visually and/or audibly) but I believe there is a potential need for cataloging, searching, and interacting with audio.

Good luck and I look forward to using the finished product.

Cheers,
Brad
West Coast, Canada

Posted by: Brad Hay |bdhay02AT NOSPAMhotmail dot com

9/7/2006 6:03:22 AM UTC

Additional applications:
Further to my previous message, I thought of some additional uses for Photosynth's amazing functionality:

- integrate PhotoSynth with a 3D globe of the Earth (e.g. Virtual Globe, Encarta's World Atlas)... Zooming to the street or building level would allow for an option to seamlessly transition to a Photosynth view of popular landmarks or locations. Take that...satellite imagery!

- Utilize the GPS telemetry data available with some cameras to allow for exact positioning and assist with calculating the size and perspective of objects.

- Utilize the datetime stamps in photos (provided they are reliable) to allow some to navigate through time and observe a location over time (e.g. deforestation, pollution's effects on the Taj Mahal, etc).

- Help law enforcement personnel identify unknown locations in photographs by matching them up with identified features found in other indexed photos. For example, this would help tremendously to help identify locations where pics of abducted individuals have been taken and posted on the Internet (I know it is an ugly topic but this may have help a case in recent years where police organizations in Canada and the US were madly trying to find a location where a child was being victimized on an internet webcam and there were some landmarks visible).

Good luck,
Brad

Posted by: Brad Hay |bdhay02AT NOSPAMhotmail dot com

9/12/2006 5:45:12 PM UTC

now this is what we want, Google eat your heart out....
combine it with the functionality and you have a killer app.
changing the we we use yellow pages etc....
besides the fun you can have watching your holiday pics ....:)

Posted by: Cees van Gastel |ceesvgAT NOSPAMhotmail dot com

9/18/2006 5:53:24 PM UTC

Like Robert I would like to make my own 3d. I am used to render 3d animation and it takes a lot of time. So the time is not a problem for me.
And seance the idea is to make every body share their collection Way not share their CPU also. In order to build a distributed computing platform, in other to scale up the processing power, and be ready for bigger pictures as they come.

Posted by: Eduardo |eduardo_benedictoAT NOSPAMhotmail dot com

9/18/2006 5:58:17 PM UTC

Hi.
Why so much trouble about the processing time. We are in the right moment for heavy apps, we have 2 cores per CPU and soon we will be able to see 4 or more cores in home PC´s. But any way we cold share the power as I said before
Thanks.

Posted by: Eduardo Benedicto |eduardo_benedictoAT NOSPAMhotmail dot com

9/21/2006 10:41:36 AM UTC

Its a shame nobody replies to these blogs isn't it?

Live Labs looks like a fantastic place to work but I'd like to know a bit more baout it. What is their remit? What are they meant to produce? What has Ballmer got lined up for them next?

They are setting a benchmark with Photosynth - I'd love to see what they come up with next.

-Jamie

Posted by: Jamie Thomson |jamie dot thomsonAT NOSPAMconchango dot com

9/23/2006 5:16:27 PM UTC

Hi.
It me again, I`v being reading about using the GPU for thees job and it sounds very useful. The GPU are capable of doing a lot of flop(more than 10 CPU processing power in 1 GPU), and they do a lot of parallelism. And Microsoft has it at Microsoft research.
And is named: Accelerator: simplified programming of graphics processing units for general-purpose uses via data-parallelism
I can put then link sorry.
And in runs 18 times faster than the original code

Posted by: Eduardo Benedicto |eduardo_benedictoAT NOSPAMhotmail dot com

10/3/2006 2:09:50 AM UTC

I don't care if it takes a couple of weeks to do the math-- why not release a beta now? Days isn't an issue, but not getting to play around with it *is*. :)

Posted by: Dan |raygundanAT NOSPAMhotmail dot com

3/7/2007 3:52:51 PM UTC

I've posted elsewhere about this mind blowing significance of this technology. As a suggestion, I see benefit of gathering together a committee of sorts populated by experts in fields such as, medical, biological, information storage and retrieval, pattern recognition, holography, large space object detection to avert an ELE, astronomy; just as a start. The issues are not of the mechanics necessarily that implement the technology, but of abstracting out and relating potentially pluggable extentions. Pattern recognition does not need to stop at photos. New relationships can be derived and implemented in just about any field you can think of. Luckily, the processing power needed to do this is literally just around the corner; months, not years.

Posted by: Bill |notworriedAT NOSPAMcomcast dot net

3/29/2007 8:23:26 AM UTC

Great softare can't wait till the 3D version. Thanks

Posted by: Honda Generator |kweAT NOSPAMmsn dot com

9/10/2007 8:21:03 AM UTC

the next image in a tour that will take you through every photo in the set.

Posted by: 迷你倉 |afdafdAT NOSPAMasfadsf dot com

9/17/2007 3:32:20 PM UTC

Ok when are the updates coming ? i'm really anxious about all this.

Posted by: marine |sabina dot workAT NOSPAMyahoo dot com

9/22/2007 12:33:13 PM UTC

Hi.

It me again, I`v being reading about using the GPU for thees job and it sounds very useful. The GPU are capable of doing a lot of flop(more than 10 CPU processing power in 1 GPU), and they do a lot of parallelism. And Microsoft has it at Microsoft research.
And is named: Accelerator: simplified programming of graphics processing units for general-purpose uses via data-parallelism
I can put then link sorry.
And in runs 18 times faster than the original code...

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