Comments on: Photosynth – the emphasis is wrong

By: Crowd sourcing photosynth « electronic museum

Crowd sourcing photosynth « electronic museum — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 23:31:34 +0000

[...] 31, 2009 · No Comments I wrote about Photosynth when it first came out as a plugin back in August 2007.Then, I wasn’t sure, and [...]

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:00:55 +0000

Greg, thanks for the comment – I agree, and I don’t see (knowing not much about it..) that this would be that far beyond feasible, given today’s processing power.

The public beta of Photosynth at http://photosynth.net gives a better idea of what is possible, and I guess we’ll see that space developing a fair bit over time.

By: Greg

Greg — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:13:16 +0000

I am an engineer, and most of the work I do is retrofitting new stuff to old sites. I usually go out and take a bunch of pictures, so when we’re back in the office talking about the job, we can refer to exactly what’s on site. However, unless you’ve been to site yourself, the photos are just a big jumble of disconnected images. It’s also impossible to extract distances or geometries from the photos. If we need to build a 3D model for new construction — which happens quite frequently — then that represents hours of measuring and CAD drafting.

So I’m in complete agreement that Photosynth is focusing on the wrong result!

It would be incredibly powerful to be able to build a 3D model just by taking a bunch of photos. Building a full color solid model isn’t even necessary (although it would be very cool); even just a point cloud of sorts that could be tweaked by a user to map out features and measure distances, that would be such a killer app for the type of work I do.

By: Nick Poole

Nick Poole — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 16:35:56 +0000

Hi Mike, I kind of know what you mean with this one. Photosynth has the feel of tech that is looking for a home. Scraping flickr for content, and the associated implication that every node in the potentially inifinite network is enriched by the associative semantic metadata of every other relevant node is just brilliant. But at the same time, it is a sad truth that unless and until embedded in a no-brainer app it is likely to remain an ephemeral piece of really cool technology. The bit about Blaise Aguera y Arcas's presentation to TED2007 which really got the hairs on the back of my neck standing up was the 'infinite zoom' functionality he demonstrated by embedding microdot-sized technical specs into a car ad. I would *love* to be able to embed museum object metadata right into the object image and then to disclose it to users in this really cool way.