As I may have mentioned before, I’m trying to get in the habit of sharing something with my audiences that I only just learned — in the last 24 yours. Today, in Kannapolis, NC, I’ll tell folks about Photosynth. As a concept, it’s not new. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, of Microsoft, introduced Photosynth at TedTalks in May of 2007, to near thunderous acclaim in the blogosphere. I just learned, from Data Mining’s Matthew Hurst, that this amazing tool has formally launched.
I went to the Photosynth site, and was, once again, disappointed that it won’t run on the Mac, and I’ve got too much going on right now to run Windows and check it there. So I went to the next best thing, YouTube, to see if there were any recent videos, and found this one, a walk through that describes how to take photos of an object or place that are condusive to Photosynth’ing.
It reminds me a lot of how I use to make Quicktime VRs. Photosynth stitches photos together into a wider and more revealing panarama of the subject. However, Photosynth remains true to what’s going on, a bunch of photos synthed together to produce a world of that thing or place.
I could imagine a synthed photo arrangement of a classroom, where the teacher has place clues to an assignment. Students have to explore the classroom (museum, forest, local workplace, etc.) to discover the answer to a meaningful question.
Not often that I have Windows-envy, but this morning, I crave that distinctive bootup tone!
I WILL be doing something soon with Photosynth…it looks very cool. Thanks again for doing my work for me.
Peace,
scott