Microsoft Live Labs

Improved Photosynth Installer

2007-09-04T14:45:21.315-07:00

With the popularity of the recent collections from the space shuttle Endeavor, we continued to receive feedback that a few people with specific configurations were unable to install the Photosynth viewer. We’ve made a few tweaks to the installer that should resolve the majority of those issues, including support for 64-bit systems. If you were one of the unlucky few who couldn’t try Photosynth before, give the new installer try.

There’s no new functionality, just a better install experience, so you don’t need to do anything if you already have Photosynth installed.

Shuttle Endeavour Tiles

2007-08-20T16:19:05.642-07:00

As the seven-member crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour prepare for their return to Kennedy Space Center tomorrow morning. We are pleased to announce an update to our collaboration with NASA.

Prior to docking at the international space station the Space Shuttle Endeavour did a complete somersault enabling astronauts in the International Space Station to photograph the shuttle's bottom-side. The photos were then sent back to NASA for analysis. The Space Administration has been kind enough to share those images with Microsoft Live Labs. We have taken the photos and created a “synth” so people around the world can take part in the NASA experience.

So here it is, your chance to take first-hand look at what you might see on a space-walk .

Click here to install the Photosynth viewer and experience for yourself.

Adam Sheppard
Group Product Manager

Live Labs | Microsoft

2007-08-05T21:39:24.192-07:00

Today, we’re announcing an exciting collaboration with NASA using Photosynth technology, to create three-dimensional environments of preparations for the launch of space shuttle Endeavour. For the first time ever, viewers can experience unprecedented views of shuttle Endeavour on the launch pad, interior and surrounding area of the Vehicle Assembly Building, and the return of previous flight Shuttle Atlantis atop a 747. Photosynth is able to capture the depth and complexity of the shuttle’s structure, providing exclusive images to viewers around the world enabling the unique ability to explore this NASA mission.

Click here to install the Photosynth viewer or visit our video section to see the technology in action.

In addition, Live Labs has collaborated with MSNBC to create a special multimedia tour of the Kennedy Space Center at http://spaceworld.msnbc.com

Adam Sheppard
Group Product Manager

Live Labs | Microsoft

Britain in Pictures: BBC Collection

2007-06-06T15:19:27.954-07:00

Over the last 6 months we’ve been working with the BBC on a time limited technical trial of the Photosynth technology in support of the 'How We Built Britain' television series. Viewers will be able to explore synths of Ely Cathedral, Burghley House, the Royal Crescent, Bath, the Scottish Parliament Buildings, and Blackpool Tower Ballroom at http://labs.live.com/photosynth/bbc/. The BBC will also have units on location at each of the historic sites to collect images from tourists visiting the sites that we will add to the synths in the weeks to come. Be sure to check out Trafalgar Square that also features some fantastic historical photography to contrast how people interacted with the locations in the past and present and check back every few weeks to see how they evolve.

Adam Sheppard
Group Product Manager

Live Labs | Microsoft

Photosynth at TED Conference

2007-06-04T15:38:25.574-07:00

In March of this year Microsoft Live Labs Architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas spoke at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference in Monterey, CA. Blaise demonstrated Seadragon and Photosynth to an enthusiastic audience and painted a vision for how these technologies will evolve in the months and years ahead. Watch the short video above to see some of the amazing ways these technologies will change the way you interact with your images in the future, and visit the Photosynth site to try the latest collections from the team.

Exploring Ancient Korea

2007-05-16T12:14:23.361-07:00

Over the last few months we’ve been gathering feedback both internally and from our partners on the authoring experience for Photosynth. The experiments have yielded some fantastic results that we anticipate sharing on the site in the weeks and months ahead. Today we’d like to share one such example from our friends at MSN Korea. One brisk Seoul winter month, over 4,000 photos were submitted by local Koreans to help construct this synth of Gyeongbok Palace, one of South Korea's finest national treasures. Originally built in 1394, it is the largest palace of the Joseon Dynasty. At its height in the mid 1800's, it covered 330 buildings and over 4 million square feet as the grand home for the royal family. This is the first synth we’ve shown that contains a mix of professional photography and candid photos from other people using their own cameras.

Enjoy exploring the Palace and check back soon for even more Photosynth goodness.

Adam Sheppard
Group Product Manager

Live Labs | Microsoft

And now in Firefox

2007-01-23T12:16:26.804-08:00

It's been great for us to watch your comments, suggestion and ideas around Photosynth. As you know, this is a long term project and the team continues to make progress on a daily basis to add more functionality to the underlying technology. After we released the technology preview in November we saw a number of requests for a version that would work in Firefox. Live Labs is committed to making our technologies available to the widest possible audience, and today we're happy to announce the availability of the Photosynth Firefox plugin. We know that you are waiting for the day when you will be able to create your own collections, and that will happen, but in the meantime look for more beautiful new examples of Photosynth in action over the coming months.

Adam Sheppard
Group Product Manager

Live Labs | Microsoft

Fun with Pho: Free Motion

2006-11-17T09:40:39.665-08:00

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

Fun with "Pho": Autoplay

2006-11-14T15:22:27.982-08:00

If you’re as mesmerized by exploring some of the Photosynth collections as we are, you might be interested to know that there’s a hidden autoplay function in Photosynth. Launch any collection, then press the “1” key. Every 7 seconds Photosynth will advance to the next image in a tour that will take you through every photo in the set. Clicking anywhere interrupts the tour, but you can use your mouse wheel to zoom while the tour is going on if you like. You can almost run it as a screensaver... just maximize IE using F11 and minimize the sidebar tab and the application will fill your screen.

There’s even a back door to control the transition time. If you add an “&autoPlayInterval=5000” argument to the end of your URL, you get a slide show that transitions every 5000 milliseconds, or 5 seconds. (The minimal legal value for this parameter is 3000). Here’s a sample URL: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/view.html?collection=FaiginGallery/index1.sxs&autoPlayInterval=5000

Be careful – watching Photosynth do its thing can seriously impact your productivity.

Cheers,

David Gedye
Seadragon and Photosynth Group Manager

Live Labs | Microsoft

So, here it is . . .

2006-11-08T17:50:08.727-08:00

It’s been just a few short months since we announced Photosynth at SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston and boy have we been busy!

Today we’re very happy to announce the first public release of our Photosynth Technology Preview. For those of you who’ve provided encouragement, ideas and spread the word we thank you. We hope that you’ll enjoy our current work and continue to help us shape the technology as we push onwards. For those of you who found yourselves here after your buddy sent you a link to our website saying, ‘You’ve got to check this out!’, read a little about what we’re doing, try it out for yourself, and obviously tell everyone else you know. :)

We thought you might have some questions about this release and we’ll do our best to answer them. If there’s anything we haven’t addressed feel free to post to the comments in the blog and we’ll get to them as quickly as we can.

Q. What does Photosynth do?
A. Photosynth combines hundreds or thousands of regular digital photos of a scene to present a detailed 3D model, giving viewers the sensation of smoothly gliding around the scene from every angle. The scene can be constructed regardless of whether the photos are from a single or multiple sources. 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. By viewing the photos in a 3D context you are able to get a better sense for the place where they were captured.

Q. What exactly is a ‘Technology Preview’?
A. In essence a Technology Preview is a sneak peek at good things to come. Microsoft Live Labs is very much focused on pushing the state of the art of the internet forward and showing what’s possible today. We like to do things quickly and in a very collaborative way. Over time you’ll start to see more and more of our technologies work their way into great products across Microsoft, but in the meantime we want to get your feedback on what we’re doing right, and areas where we can improve. Being on the cutting edge unfortunately comes at a little bit of a cost so if your computer is more than a couple of years old, there's a chance that your graphics drivers may prevent Photosynth from running properly. If weird stuff happens, please install the latest drivers for your graphics card and try again.

Q.When can I build my own collections?
A. We’re working on it! We want to provide this capability as soon as we can but there are some real technical hurdles to solve before we’re ready for primetime. Today each and every image in a collection needs to be compared against each and every other image in order to see if it’s a match for the scene undergoing reconstruction. Processing to build a collection can take hours or days in some cases. We have lots of ideas on how to improve this processing time but we need some time test some of these ideas and make the tools easy for people to use. In other words, stay tuned and enjoy the collections we’ll be releasing in the months to come until we’re ready for our next big update.

Thanks and enjoy!
The Photosynth Team.