A Stitch in Kind -- Photosynth

Photosynth is a marriage of a portal and software that 'stitches' multiple photographs of an object together and processes them to create a panoramic view of the object photographed.

Microsoft has updated its Photosynth - software-cum-portal - to allow access to end-users.
Photosynth is a marriage of a portal and software that 'stitches' multiple photographs of an object together and processes them to create a panoramic view of the object photographed -- it's akin to the Panorama filter in Photoshop bu at a much grander scale, as the developers behind it put it: "Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point the photos were taken from.

With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos." Photosynth, a Microsoft Live Labs project, was thus far only using images uploaded by Microsoft themselves or by the BBC and NatGeo. Us mortals did not have an option to submit our own photographs to generate a panorama out of. It did offer a tech preview but that was very system unfriendly; with a slow interface.

With the recent update, Microsoft seems to have fixed these flaws. The current design will enable users to process their photos on their local machines and then upload the same to Microsoft's Photosynth servers. David Gedye, group manager at Live Labs, who is in charge of this project says "There's a green story here,instead of massive data centers, we're using the available power on your machine."

You will need to download software to be able to upload your photos. As of now, all uploaded images are public, with options for comments. A closed community and an option for popular images to be displayed on the home page, are in the pipeline. It will also give users the option to mark their images as copyrighted material under the Creative Commons license, or to make them public domain.

Incidentally, after Photosynth was opened, Microsoft's servers were inundated with requests -- far more than they had planned for, and the service experienced outages. "We have been abolsutely overwhlemed by demand, and have turned Photosynth.com into a special static/read-only mode for the moment", added synthy on the Photosynth blog. While the site was taken down for a while, it is currently back up but with limited functionality: "new uploads off for the moment, but will turn them back on shortly."

Photosynth took almost three years in the making and was eveloped by Microsoft in collaboration with the University of Washington. Head to Photosynth.com for more.