There was a stunning presentation at TED on Microsoft’s Seadragon technology. See it on YouTube.
Software recognizes patterns in images and joins meta data together. You gain a multi-angle view of basically every spot on earth you can find publicly available images on. This view is used to create a 3D model. Seadragon helps to navigate among the vast amount of data. Seadragon is a RIA visual data (more than just images?) explorer with a neat zoom feature solely “limited by the number of pixels on your screen”.
The technology preview of Photosynth is online at http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
Why do I promote a Microsoft technology here? Well, I do not really care if Microsoft or anybody else is evil or not. I’m looking for solutions that work, and the acquisition and R&D work that Microsoft has done here is really amazing. A couple of things I’d like to point out:
- You gain value by just offering your pictures, because they get tagged according to the other comparable image’s taggs
- The “data is the next intel inside” and UGC talk applies 100%. A great algorithm generates value only on user generated content.
- The technology definitely leverages high bandwidth and resolution but by definition will work on any device with any connection to the net.
I’m looking forward to being able to upload my own pictures to a collection or even get my hands on the technology myself.
The are a few collections here.
