Ever since Photosynth was announced at SIGGRAPH, people have been asking about the relationship to the Photo Tourism paper. I thought I would write up a bit of history surrounding this multi-team project.
About six months ago, a Microsoft researcher, a PhD student, and a University professor invented a new photo browsing technology called “Photo Tourism”. The technology was so cool that anyone who saw it wanted to be part of the project. Noah Snavely, a student at the University of Washington (UW), had single-handedly coded a rich prototype under the joint supervision of Steve Seitz (also from UW) and Rick Szeliski from Microsoft Research (MSR). The question was: what were we (Microsoft) going to do with such a rich concept? We had joint IP between a non-profit and a for-profit organization for what could be a very hot product. As a Research Area Manager at MSR, my role was to promote both Microsoft’s business interests and the open MSR-academic collaboration tradition that had made this project possible in the first place. Unfortunately, no product team could immediately absorb this technology. The solution came from Live Labs, a new research group with a product focus.
Live Labs is both a research and a rapid development organization, with a commitment to produce high-impact prototypes related to the Internet. This emphasis distinguishes it from the more general and academic Microsoft Research. It also provides good complementarities between Live Labs and universities. Between January and March, Live Labs had two growth spurts. Late in January, Live Labs completed the acquisition of Seadragon, a Seattle company of 10 employees headed by Blaise Aguera y Arcas. Later in March, Gary Flake convinced me to head the research arm of Live Labs. I transferred from MSR along with a dozen other scientists and engineers. Both events would influence the future of Photo Tourism by providing the means and motivation to take it to the next step.
Seadragon had also developed a photo browsing technology. It was very different from Photo Tourism. Seadragon provided seamless zooming around collections of pictures and efficient multi-resolution streaming transport between clients and servers. Photo Tourism matched pictures, found logical transitions between them, and built a 3 dimensional interraction model. Seadragon and Photo Tourism were a marriage of technologies made in heaven. With rapid prototyping in mind, we entered a mutually beneficial partnership between the University of Washington, Live Labs, and MSR. The symbiosis of Photo Tourism and Seadragon became the Live Labs project called Photosynth, a marriage of technologies as well as cultures. The PhotoSynth team is made of Seadragon, the original inventors of Photo Tourism, and several researchers from MSR and Live Labs. Working together they built a prototype which enables users to remotely navigate and explore a 3D model, which is automatically built from a collection of pictures. The prototype was previewed at SIGGRAPH and will be released on the Web in a few weeks.
Patrice SimardChief ScientistMicrosoft Live Labs