RealityEquation

∗ Microsoft Photosynth: An Early Review

Microsoft (MSFT) is planning to pull off a Charlie Eppes on us. That’s right; Redmond is developing Photosynth, a tool that takes a bunch of photographs, analyses them (and although that’s just two words, there’s really a lot going on at the back; there, better), and — get this — reconstructs them in 3D. Yes, it’s the stuff of the future, in the near future! For the moment, you can check out the technology preview.

Here’s what their website has to say:

Welcome to Photosynth, a new technology from Microsoft Live Labs that takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.

We’ve assembled a few collections for you to play with, and we’re working on adding more. In the future you’ll be able to “photosynthesize” your own photos, but we aren’t there yet.

And hey, it’s a tech preview, so you might encounter a bug or two.

We’ll update our blog with information on improvements and new collections as we go along. We welcome your comments, bug reports, and ideas.

Okay, this is nothing less than mindblowing. And so obvious, if you think about it. Animation was all about taking something that’s infinite — time — and breaking it down into something that, with our limited and immediate senses, looks infinite. 24 still frames per second was all that we needed, and we had motion. It’s the same with space. You take something that’s infinite — space, in this case — and collectively add frames to try recreate it. Of course, where as animation is linear, this requires a lot more logic to it (which is why I suspect there are mathematicians to be thanked here too).

Things You Can Do

Look Around
A galaxy of pixels will give you a wireframe-like view of the area in 3D. You can navigate around in either by clicking on the arrows, or on selected ‘hot spots’. These hot-spots are based on the field-of-view of a certain photograph among the hundres in the collection, and clicking on a spot will fly you to that photograph.

Switch View
Not all angles of the 3D wireframe can be rendered in photograph — that depends on if there’s a photograph from that particular angle — but you can click on ‘Show Cameras’ and it’ll show you from where all the photographs in that collection were taken. In 3D.

A Closer Look
Moving backwards and forwards will get you a better feel of the environment, and show more detail if that’s what you want and it’s a high-resolution photograph.

Fly Around
You can select the ‘Fly Around’ mode and you’ll get a quick (crazy-) bird’s eye 360 view around your selected photo. When you’re lost in 3D space and want to know where you are, you’ll love this.

Take the Alternate
Photosynth manages redundancy well. You can click on ‘Go to Similarity View’ to be presented with a tile of alternate images (as determined by the software). The animation here is excellent.

Square One
Or you can click on ‘Home’ to start all over go to the first photo (the defined starting position) in the collection. If you’re deep in synthesis, the animation here can be real fun.

Share
And, of course, you can share ‘Share this view with a friend’. But all button is is a mailto link, so clicking it’ll launch your email client. Which is sad, although I do expect this behavior to change — replaced by a nice email/blog/digg/del.icio.us interface — soon.

Possibilities

In Season 2, Episode 3 (’Obsession’) of Numb3rs, the FBI try to determine the location where certain photos were taken, and employ Charlie and Larry use the concepts of spherical astronomy to do it; maybe if they had Photosynth (and Photosynth had a huge userbase), things would be a lot easier. And Charlie could explain to us how exactly the software pulls it off.

We’re already using Flickr to get familiar with places we plan to visit, colleges we’re exploring or iPhones we’re drooling over. But with this, exploring will be a lot more easier. And awesome-r, with all the visual effects.

About the Visual Effects

You know those computer screens in action movies that show things flashing around and all these graphs squiggling about? And how you said, “Gosh, this is so unreal!”? Yeah, well, it’s real now. Trust me. Ask someone to take a video of you while you try this thing for the first time, and tell me if it doesn’t look familiar. Yep, you’re that cool geek now.

Redmond First

And here’s the shocking bit - thanks to Microsoft. Before Google (GOOG). Before Apple (AAPL). In a sudden case of time machine.

No-Mac Zone

The Firefox XPI add-in doesn’t install on a Mac, and Safari just doesn’t work. Try, and you’ll get this:

Windows XP SP2 and Vista Only

The Photosynth technology preview runs only on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista.
If you feel you’ve reached this message in error, you can try anyway.

Keeping Up

Keep a weather eye on this one (except on that menu in the top-left corner, and that weird rollover effect *shivers*). For now, try the demo, read the FAQ or keep up with the team blog.

Screenshots

Response

What do you make of Photosynth? Do you think Google or Apple will follow?

I’d love to know what you think, and welcome your comments. Or digg this article if you like.