MS Live Labs’ Photosynth

My secret mole at Microsoft passed this little top-secret project over to me: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/video.html  Wow, what a brilliant concept — use the world’s photos to reconstruct a location. (Also worth checking out are the other lab-like projects that the Evil Empire is working on: http://labs.live.com)  Here’s a snippet from my MSN Messenger conversation with said-mole:
jeff jeff jeff cat! says:   have you seen this? http://labs.live.com/photosynth/video.html         jeff jeff jeff cat! says:          should try leveraging it for jerde v2         Wil (Mod7) says:          wow, that’s @#$% [ed] wicked         Wil (Mod7) says:          i wonder how they will address temporal change         Wil (Mod7) says:          i.e., my photo of the woodward’s building that isn’t there anymore         jeff jeff jeff cat! says:        very interesting.. i wonder if thigns would gradually deconstruct         Wil (Mod7) says:          maybe timestamps. etc might help, combined with a little ‘timestamp’ voting where more images of a particular location exist  \       Wil (Mod7) says:          but, yeah, with incomplete, multi-tiome coverage         Wil (Mod7) says:          it could be a wild look        jeff jeff jeff cat! says: it is effed up.. what you were asking about “what if a building goes away”   jeff jeff jeff cat! says:         that’ll be a feature soon enough.. since photos have a timestamp, they’re thinking of letting you look at a scene chronologically.. and possibly into renaissance time (using paintings & etchings). Spladow!   Wil (Mod7) says:         pow!~ that’s HOT  jeff jeff jeff cat! says:         yeah dude.. soon enough there will be a public version. The crazy thing is - there’s NO human input. All the positioning, stitching, recognition, 3d, etc. is automated by robots   Wil (Mod7) says:         THAT is what computers should be doing   Wil (Mod7) says:         i’m so impressed   jeff jeff jeff cat! says:         Almost as cool as the software is the mechanics behind it. It’s a bit much to get into, but i’m glad to know there are smart smart people out there.   Wil (Mod7) says:     
what’s interesting is how that emerged from a rapid visualization tool 

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