Pictures are terribly unorganized. One of the coolest ways we should be able to view pictures is to pick a location, like say “Niagara Falls”, and be immersed in a 3D experience of individual pictures stitched together. Clearly the process of sticking pictures together to create VR Tours has been around for a while, and takes very precise camera equipment and software to make it work. What if there was software out there that could automatically take the world’s pictures, or even just your picture collection, and automatically stitch them together correctly?
The research team from the University of Washington and Microsoft research published their paper “Photo Tourism” back in 2006 (Microsoft’s Photo Tourism Research site is here), and this year, they improved immensely on the original concept. The new version of Photosynth was showed off at SIGGRAPH last week in Los Angeles. While the original Photosynth technology “simply” stitched pictures together, the new version of the software actually manipulates the pictures to create a more lifelike 3D experience that you have to see to believe.
The new version also lets viewers see the same location from multiple angles. The system also figures out locations that have the most shots taken, and creates orbits around those locations. Check out the video below or go to the University of Washington’s Finding Paths web site.
Anyway, if you want to check out Photosynth for yourself, head to the Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth page. And of course if you want to find out all the gritty details on how they made the software, check out the published paper on Finding Path’s Through the World’s Photos.