Free motion is another somewhat hidden feature of Photosynth. We’ve documented the keys in our help section, but we haven’t gone out of our way to advertise it. If you’ve ever played Doom or a similar pc game, we use a very similar (but not exact and I’ll get into why down below) key layout.

With your left hand, use the keys w,a,s,d to move forward, left, back and right. And, Since we can go up and down unlike in Doom, we use the e and c keys, respectively, for this motion.

With your right hand use the p.l.;.’ keys to rotate up, left, down and right.

When used in combination, these keys let you move in any direction through the scene. One of the best ways to start is to hit ‘e’ once to pop up above the scene a bit, then use ; to rotate the scene down so you can see it. Then you can use your left hand to roam around above it.  If you get lost, hit ‘enter’ to center back on the currently select photo or hit 0 to go to the home photo.

This is especially effective in the larger sites of San Marco and St Peters. It lets you get more of a feel for the 3D nature of the scene and to take in what we feel is the beauty of the point clouds.

It’s also shows interesting potential in the Faigin Gallery. Click here to see where I’ve navigated overhead to see the footprint of Gary’s studio.

If you think this is cool let us know. We left the feature in the app, but didn’t expose it through the UI, because it’s just not that compelling. Don’t get me wrong, the motion itself works fine – all of the movements are consistent and move you through the space as you would expect. The problem comes into play with the data and the way we present photos. Since we don’t have any constraints in the current model, when you’re moving around freely, it’s very easy to go through photos and get lost. In fact, when we first designed the UI, we used the arrows for rotation, but in testing we found that it confused people and didn’t add to the experience. That was why we switched the arrow keys to go to a next photo in a given direction. Eventually we’d love it if you could move around freely and have photos automatically display that represent where you are looking.

Jonathan Dughi

Photosynth Program Manager 

Live Labs | Microsoft