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!