Imaging | Software Development in the Real World

Watch Obama’s Inauguration

Barack Obama - Change we can beleive in The eyes of the world will be on Barack Obama today as he takes the oath of the office to become the 44th President of the United States. Over a million people will be at the event. With the advances in technology in the last few years, Barack Obama’s inauguration will be the most well documented inauguration in history. Social Networking sites and tools will all be a buzz for the entire day. Cell phone networks will be working overtime. What is the best way to watch Obama’s Inauguration?

The Moment will be a pretty cool site to check out over the next few hours. Photosynth allows a series of two-dimensional pictures to be stitched and interpolated into a three-dimensional representation of a moment in time. The more angles and photos, the more complete the rendering. I’ve made a few myself in the past and the output is very impressive!

Also if you want to just watch the live stream on the official Presidential Inauguration Committee stream, make sure you go to their live Barack Obama Inauguration Live Feed. The stream is powered by Microsoft Silverlight technologies.

Microsoft Releases Image Composite Editor (ICE)

A lot of people seem to think Microsoft is all about Windows and Office, and that’s it. The reality is there is a lot more going on at Redmond than you might think. The best part is a lot of the Research that goes on at Microsoft is freely available on the Internet. Take Microsoft “ICE” for example. Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. You shoot a set of overlapping photographs of a scene from a single location, and Image Composite Editor creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all your images at full resolution.

Finally you can take your new creation and save your stitched panorama in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom.

Microsoft ICE Features

The Image Composite Editor is completely free. Microsoft explains that some of the major features are it’s ability to stitch pictures together like nothing that has been commercially available before, and also has some pretty amazing export formats. Some features include:

State-of-the-art stitching algorithms
Advanced orientation adjustment view
Exposure blending
Output in many formats:
- HD View
- Silverlight Deep Zoom
- TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and more

Microsoft Image Composer Editor