Yesterday, I wasted an hour or so flying around Chicago on Google Earth, inspired by a series of Gigapan shots of Chicago (enter through Google Earth). Chicago is home base for Motorola. The city hosts WiMAX World next week at the McCormick Place Convention Center. This is the big one.
Now Microsoft has publicly released Photosynth, a way of combining conventional images to create 3D scenes. After you upload a set of images, the software analyzes each for similarities to the others, and then it uses this data to build a model of where the photos were taken. A viewer can then browse through the final photograph, navigating smoothly and zooming in on tiny details.
Conventional digital cameras, with a single viewpoint on the world, cannot build a 3D model of the space the photograph is in. Photosynth identifies common features in multiple photographs and uses them to work out how the images relate to one another. It then uses this information to build up a 3D map and combines images shot at different times, dates and resolutions into one contiguous space.
The Photosynth Blog provides some of the background. The team has provided video and pdf instructions for creating your own ‘Synths,’ including a guide to subjects and photographs.
Tour The Grand Canal in Venice. Explore great synths from others or create a few of your own.
Vint Cerf says around 70% of the human population will have fixed or mobile access to the Internet at increasingly high speeds, up to gigabits per second in the next 10 years. Mobile devices will become a major component of the Internet, as will appliances and sensors of all kinds. Many of the things on the Internet, whether mobile or fixed, will know where they are, both geographically and logically.
