Camera2Web.com

Myron Kassaraba's weblog about digital photography on the web

Monday, July 31, 2006

MS Live Labs to show Photosynth @ Siggraph

Microsoft's Live Labs will be demonstrating Photosynth, a prototype implementation of research from the Interactive Visual Media Group combined with some technology they picked up with the acquisition of Seadragon.

For those of you visiting Boston for Siggraph, Richard Szelinski from Microsoft Research will be presenting their paper, titled Photo Tourism: Exploring Photo Collections in 3D on Wednesday 8/2, Hall B2, 8:30-10:15AM.

You should definitely watch the video on the Photosynth site. The ability to take arbitrary photos and automatically register then for orientation to be combined into a 3D view is groundbreaking. There have been similar approaches such as the technology from MOK3 which now powers the Supertour.com site though their approach still requires some operator intervention to register multiple pictures.

I was thinking about an interesting mashup. There was an article in the NYT this Sunday about the SkyScout that uses positioning technology from Yamcon that not only grabs GPS location but uses sensors to know the direction and elevation of where the device is pointed (SkyScout tells you what stars you are looking at).

Imagine if you had the SkyScout's positioning/orientation system built into a digital camera that could save that info with the image to be used for feeding photos into something like PhotoSynth!

Sunday, July 30, 2006

More Visual Search - Xcavator

From my friends at Future Image is a tip on a new service called Xcavator from San Fransico-based Cognisign.

I highly recommend the Cool Video Intro link and demo with Flickr. What I really like about Xcavator is that rather than trying to rely 100% on computer vision to do fully automatic similarity matching - it takes simple input from the searcher to improve the results. By clicking on regions in the source image you help narrow your results. The Golden Gate Bridge sample/demo is really impressive.

Riya who is now switching to visual search will have to keep a close eye on Cognisign. Riya CEO Munjal Shah goes into quite a bit of detail in the Riya 2.0 Roadmap post about their plans.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Trying out Zooomr 2.0

I've finally made it beyond the huge obstacle of signing up/logging on to Zooomr (they use some bizarre link to OpenID) to give it a try since I'd like to check out the geotagging. They are offering bloggers a free upgrade to a pro account. That requires you to post a Zooomr photo to your blog. So here's mine, a panorama of Fenway Park from a few weeks ago when we had some great seats on the right field roof deck.


FenwayPano061106
FenwayPano061106
Hosted on Zooomr


More on my thoughts about Zooomr once I have had some more time to give it a good test drive.......