Photosynth is next photo revolution

It's not often that I'm impressed by new things that my computer can do - Google Earth was the last application I considered truly revolutionary.

However, Microsoft's Photosynth is to me the next groundbreaking application.  It takes photos taken at all different angles and levels of zoom, and reconstructs a complete three-dimensional scene.  It does this through local computation - I can't imagine how complex the algorithms must be.  And it works amazingly well - I uploaded a set of photos of a building viewed from street level, looking up, and from building-top level, looking down, and it integrated them correctly.  For a 30-photo set, it didn't even take very long, just a few minutes to process the entire "Synth".

There are some caveats: Windows only for now (unsurprisingly), XP and Vista.  This includes the viewer.  (The software does, however, run fine in Firefox 3 on Windows).  You can't view the scenes locally, the only option is to upload to the Photosynth site.

Also, Photosynth was massively overloaded yesterday and had to shut down, it will be interesting to see how they handle the load in the days and weeks to come.

But enough about that, here are a couple Synths I made

A simple panorama of Florence (Firenze) - not much different than existing pano software can produce

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=647b73f0-9549-4fa3-adc7-93e509517ffc

A Synth built from 30 photos of the Duomo - it didn't quite manage to connect the Campanile with the rest of the building, but otherwise quite impressive.  Use "play" (the standard play arrow, in the bottom "leaf" of the interface in the upper right of the Synth) to get the full tour through the scene it built.

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=9cb03c3e-3c57-4fbb-8b52-c83afedaa294

UPDATE: You can also imagine where this starts to go - there are already multiple synths of Florence and the Duomo - you can imagine making a metaSynth by combining them all.  Eventually, you would end up with a complete 3D model for any heavily photographed area, and in fact probably for most urban areas in the world.  It could become sort of like a crowdsourced version of Google's Street View.  (Currently the geotagging abilities of Photosynth are quite rudimentary, but with some minor enhancements you can see it would save a lot of compute time in terms of finding overlapping and adjacent synths.)

Previously:
November 11, 2006  3D photo environment - MS Photosynth Tech Preview