Photosynth - interesting initiative from Microsoft

On August 20, 2008, Microsoft officially released Photosynth to the public, allowing users to upload their images and generate their own Photosynth models. What is photosynth?

Photosynth is a software application from Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington that analyzes digital photographs to build a three-dimensional point cloud of a photographed object.

Pattern recognition components compare portions of images to create points, which are then compared to convert the image into a model. Users are able to view and generate their own models using a software tool available for download at the Photosynth website.

Here is an excellent video presentation from ted (please select flash version below):



So why is this interesting? Well, often we do not know what can emerge from new technologies like this. But one of the most obvious reason why this is interesting, is because it connects digital images together with respect to the content. This basically means that we're creating a large scaled network of images which is browsable and searchable. And over time we can develop very presice 3D-models of cities and certain objects around the world. Maybe this data and these models can help us develop better navigational tools and synthetic vision for other scientific fields, such as robotics.


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Further reading and sources:
Original website of video
Wikipedia - Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth
Photosynth website