I’ve been spending a lot of time going through the amazing demonstrations over at TED, a repository for tech demonstrations that take place at the exclusive tech conference annually in Monterey, CA. (more info here)
Every video is great, but this one really stands out:
Photosynth: perhaps the coolest thing Microsoft has ever been at least partially involved in.
It is intricately linked to the photo manipulation software ‘Seadragon‘– a way of viewing images with beautifully smooth mouse movements. From the site:
The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest – and, we hope, most exciting – way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.
In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.
Essential Video here.