Photosynth the stitch happy photo tool which … “takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next”.
Large collections of photos of a place you say? Interesting, I happen to know somewhere that has about 7 million of those. If we all pool our resources we may yet be able to leverage all this research and computational power to reconstructs cats from all over the world in 3D! It’s a breakthrough for feline kind.
Glibness aside. I’m assuming that Photosynth works best when all the photos are taken by the same person, with the same equipment, at the same time of day, so you get the same lighting, colours, Depth of Field and so on.
As much as I wish you could just throw all 30,719 photos tagged Notre Dame at it and hope for something, I expect that’s not going to happen for a couple of years, we’ll see what we* can do to help though! Because once you have enough information to know if the photo was taken from outside Notra Dame but of Notra Dame, that’s probably more useful in helping you filter which photos are more likely to be useful.
At the moment, there’s also probably a sweet-spot in (location) interestingness for useful photos. Too interesting and the chances are it’s an artistic HDR. More midrange and you’re probably going to start getting ‘holiday snap’ type photos, which I suspect will be better fodder for Photosynth.
Anyway, the Tech Preview is up, if you’re on Windows and IE give it a whirl.
[via O'Reilly Radar]
*’we’ as in flickr providing tools to help users improve metadata about location based photos if they wish, i.e. inside, outside, at, of, heading, distance and so on.
