Change forever the way you think about digital photos with Photosynth

By James O'Neill, IT Pro Evangelist

There's a problem that's always bugged photographers: you can only get so much in a photo. The camera is at one point in 3D space, aimed and focused on another point in 3D space. and has a given angle of view. Now you can keep the camera at the same place and take pictures aimed at different points then stitch the resulting pictures together to form a Panorama You can move the camera around a single object and stitch the results together to get what I call a "peel" - which is trickier than a Panorama, but still produces a continuous photograph which gives you a single impression of a bigger scene.

We have had tools to let you move a computer viewpoint around a large panorama for some time, but they relied on having the whole thing on your computer. With people stitching together GigaPixel images for viewing on the internet we need some new strategies for only sending the viewer the piece of image they want at the resolution they want, and last year Microsoft acquired a technology called Sea-Dragon which helps with this.

The painter David Hockney said that traditional photography was “alright, if you don't mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed Cyclops - for a split second” and to get round this he experimented with making collages of photographs which he called "Joiners". A joiner isn't smooth and continuous like a panorama, it’s a lot of individual impressions which taken together give an impression of a whole - but one that couldn't be seen from one viewpoint, or at a single moment.

Stitching in the dark room is too hard – it really requires a computer, and making collages is easier on screen than with prints and glue, but the when we’re done we might just as well make a print. The computer doesn’t contribute the viewing process it just pans and zooms to cope with the limited view the screen gives compared with standing in front of a print.– it’s not a new "multimedia experience". Can’t computers do something more interesting with Multiple pictures?

Cue Photosynth. It's such a visual experience that following the links will be better than any description I can give, but I’ll try to give you a flavour of it It takes a lot of photos of the same place and relates them together. It finds features which appear in different pictures and works out how they overlap, and where the camera view point must have been. Provided there is enough in a picture that lets it link to the others, photosynth will calculate where the camera was and where images were in 3D space. Having assembled the set of images it allows you can move around as if you had stood at the different camera positions and looked in the same direction as the photographer: get all those different impressions linked to each other so that they have a kind of context. Microsoft Research have a Video where they talk about it as a new medium (notice the book of Hockney pictures about 3 minutes in.)  Another video appears on the team’s blog which has a demo in it – that is a remarkable for the audience reaction as much as the content.

Photosynth isn’t virtual reality (which is a relief) but like VR it doesn't have any kind of experience away from the interactive one on the computer. You have to try it, but be warned: it's a beta and currently it only supports recent Microsoft Browsers on Recent OS's - it needs a 5MB download to install the active X control, but it's worth it. There are some good demos on the main page for it and some more collections linked to the BBC’s current “How we built Britain” series. Like the audience in the video everyone who sees this stuff just goes “Wow !” try it for yourself.