Tech Me

Photosynth Arrives .. Few Questions

Been long, i guess right in 2006, that Microsoft first sowed seeds of Photosynth, a supposedly view changer in picture capturing arena. The first peep into the product and it was clear Microsoft was finally after something big. But hopes floated for it to be as cool as it looked in the demo. Lets have a brief intro …

Photosynth in Microsoft’s own words:

Imagine being able to share the places and things you love using the cinematic quality of a movie, the control of a video game, and the mind-blowing detail of the real world. With nothing more than a bunch of photos, Photosynth creates an amazing new experience.

What?

So to be precise and clear, Photosynth is a platform that allows users to stitch photos together into a single 3D environment (Microsoft calls it a ’synth’, with a hope one day that would replace the tag ‘image’). Once stitched, it lets user (almost anyone accessing the Photosynth website) zoom into various parts or walk through the environment.

Installation:

To explore/create ’synth’, user needs to install the photosynth application. It consists of two parts a browser plugin and desktop client. Browser plugin is required for online exploring while the desktop client is needed for doing all the hard work of creating synths. Installation is smooth with zilch problems. As a standard windows application.

First Look..

If you have photosynth installed you can see the synth for Stonehenge Venice created by National Geographic below. If you haven’t, click on the image for running the installation.

To Conclude:
Photosynth is indeed a great application and concept. It does have what it takes to bring shift in the way images are captured and stored, also viewed. The version runs smooth and is actually a great experience. Strongly recommended.

Few open questions:

• When ‘demo’ed in 2006, a mention was made about collaboration, wherein multiple users can collaborate to create a single synth. Can’t see a way to do that.
• There was also a mention about automated synth creation which scans various images tagged similar and with underlying AI finds which parts fit where. A bit unclear myself, thanks to my mutable memory.
• Privacy is an issue with no option for making synths private. It can be a good social environment with a concept of ‘friends’ here too.
• Wish there was a clear section for system requirements. It indeed can be pretty memory consuming

All said, Photosynth still lies in Lab. I hope a lot more is yet to be seen. Eagerly waiting…

Few Further References:
Photosynth
Wikipedia
Read Write Web

Tags: images, microsoft, photosynth

Twitter in Blog/Website..

I always wanted to add my tweets to my blog, to pen in the sudden and randomly generated vibes in me. I use to do that at twitter. But i wanted to pull in the thoughts at one place. As i owned the place now, i thought of a dedicated section for the purpose and hence came into existence the “Blabber Land“.

If you follow the link, you can find the live demonstration of twitter in blog under the first section named “Abrupt Blabberings“. The procedure is pretty not-so-complex sorts. And with a simple but informative article like this your work is greatly reduced. Thanks Remy …

But still it would need a bit of a scripting and customizing on your part, for better results that is. Few points to remember (basically the ones i didn’t :P)

1. Make sure you add the <div id=”twitter”> section at a proper place. Before pulling the tweets, book the place holder and test the looks with the dummy data. Customize the div section.
2. Add the pre-fetch message at the blog. Let user know something is about to happen in the section. A progress indicator would be a plus.
3. Now add the scipt that fills in the place holder booked earier i.e. the <div> section. Make sure you rename the tweet in getTwitters(‘tweet’, to the id you have mentioned in the <div> section above. So in this case, it should be renamed as “getTwitters(‘twitter‘,”
4. Adding the script section towards the </body> tag of your page would always be favorable. The simple reason being the browsers don’t start any parallel downloads i.e. of images etc as long as they don’t download the scripts. It is always recommended that scripts, wherever possible, should always come right at the end, after most of the page is completely loaded.
   

Tags: blog, twitter