What is Photosynth??
Microsoft live labs brings to you a new technology that may just change your world...or at least the way you visualize it. What it does is that it that it creates a 3D visual space from a set of flat photographs.seems impossible?well,it isn't.Photosynth has converted the seemingly impossible to reality.that is, 1+1=5!!!!
what you may be wondering is that how all this came together in the 1st place.Well, it all started when Microsoft acquired Seadragon(a startup from the Seattle area) in 2006,whose technology is capable of delivering a buttery smooth experience browsing massive quantities of visual information over the Internet. It is all the detail you want, exactly when you want it, with predictable performance regardless of the amount of data—from megapixels to gigapixels.
In the same year, from the groundbreaking research of Noah Snavely, Steve Seitz, and Richard Szeliski (Microsoft Research), a prototype called ‘photo tourism’ was born. The idea was simple: given a few dozen or few hundred photos of a place, is there enough information to reconstruct a 3D model of that place? The advanced computer vision techniques pioneered in pursuit of this goal form the basis of the synther,which is required by Photosynth to create the complex visual spaces, which are viewed using the seadragon technology.The technology used in the viewer makes it possible to download and view these complex visual spaces.The coming together of these technologies leaves us with a product which creates a truly mind-boggling effect. Microsoft Live Labs is also working with NASA in order to see how the technology can be used to bring NASA's work closer to the public environment. This project has come a long way from its photo-tourism roots and is now finding applications in the hallowed fields of advanced science.Photosynth,i believe, has the potential to be an era-changing invention of sorts,much in the same way as video have replaced coloured photographs,which in turn made b/w technology obsolete and so on.
Seadragon technology allows you to take any size image and make it a fully zoomable image,which always loads quickly.What is more interesting is the fact that seadragon uses dual Silverlight and AJAX(advanced java and xml)control to achieve this-toggling between the smoother silverlight experience when it is available and switching to the scripted browser when it is not.This ensures that the technology works on virtually any browser.Moreover,Seadragon.com is built entirely on Azure,and some secret microsoft-only version,thereby taking advantage of Azure's distributed nature and giving a sneek-peek into the capabilities of this platform.
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