SIGGRAPH 2006 and a quick update on Photosynth - Friends, Technology, Web2.0

Hi folks, it’s been a few weeks since we announced Photosynth at SIGGRAPH 2006 and we thought it might be useful to give you a quick update on what we’re up to.

Firstly, we’ve been overwhelmed with the positive responses in the blogosphere and mainstream press, with coverage including the BBC and CNET as well as Digg, Slashdot and Motley Fool. Live Labs is a small, new team at Microsoft and it’s gratifying to see that the online community shares our vision for the potential of Photosynth. One of the things we felt got a little lost in all the news was that Photosynth was born out of a deep collaboration between Rick Szeliski at Microsoft Research, Noah Snavely and Steve Seitz of the University of Washington. Noah and Steve continue to be deeply involved in helping us evolve Photosynth and exemplify the kind of cross collaboration with academia that we aspire to continue at Live Labs. You can read a lot more about their work at the Photo Tourism site.

Siggraph was a blast! We had the chance to meet hundreds of graphics professionals and enthusiasts and hear their reactions to Photosynth first hand. Rick, Noah and Steve’s presentation of "Photo tourism: Exploring photo collections in 3D" was extremely well received and we’ve been inundated with requests from people with various different applications of the Photosynth Technology.

One of the questions we’re often asked is when people will be able to create their own 3D collections. This is something we’re absolutely committed to but will not be available in our first external release. Photosynth currently requires a large number of CPU cycles to perform the matching between images and for larger datasets this can take hours or sometimes days of processing. We are exploring a number of methods for drastically reducing this processing time but want to ensure that people realize that we’re a technology that is evolving in real-time and we want to incrementally build towards the vision of a world of interconnected images through collaboration and participation from the online community.

To that end we will be releasing an ActiveX browser control this fall that will allow you to explore a number of interesting, processed collections. We showed an early build of this at our SIGGRAPH booth and many people gave us feedback on the interface that we’re currently incorporating. This build will also include the amazing multi-resolution, zoom and navigation capabilities of SeaDragon which is an experience unto itself!

So that’s all for now, stay tuned for updates from myself and some of the other folks on the team in the weeks to come and thanks again for stopping by!

Adam Sheppard
Group Manager
Microsoft Live Labs.

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