Are you responsible for any historic buildings or memorable landscapes? Would you like to find a way to share about the way that your council operates? Bring people into a virtual council chamber, or to see the inside of a fantastic building that visitors can only see the outside of today? Well, there’s a new photo system that we released last week that could do this, and organisations like the BBC and National Geographic are using for exactly that.
It’s Photosynth, which allows you to build a 3D model of a place or object from static photographs. (I’ve found I can while away half an hour easily, exploring somebody else’s model of St Marks Square, Stonehenge or even a Ferrari 575 Superamerica.)
And now that Photosynth has been fully released, it gets better. You can use Photosynth to turn regular digital photos into a three-dimensional, 360-degree model. And you can then share your synth with others – who can walk in your shoes through the same place. The technology does the hard work – reconstructing the scene or object from your flat photos – by looking for similarities between images, and using it to estimate the shape of the space/object, and work out the original camera position.
To create your own synth sign in to http://photosynth.com, download the synther application and viewer. And start building.
National Geographic are using it in a collaborative way – asking people to submit their own photos of famous sights, and then using Photosynth to merge them all together into a virtual space.
And the BBC created a series of synths with the pre-release version last year, with buildings such as Scottish Parliament and the Royal Crescent Bath. One of the spectacular ones, I thought, was the inside of the Blackpool Tower Ballroom, which allows visitors to get a really close up view of the inside of a fantastic building.
I admit that we are as guilty as any commentator on ‘green issues’ of quoting statistics such as how IT contributes 2% of the world’s carbon emissions (but can contribute to saving 10x the emissions it generates by driving greater operational efficiencies and reducing unnecessary travel through flexible and mobile working).
Now, according to the UN, another major culprit is cows – read the report on how rearing cattle produces more greenhouse gases than driving cars. Clearly, it is not an acceptable solution to cull cattle and eat more burgers and steaks.
What these ‘single issue’ statistics reveal is that the challenge of reducing carbon emissions needs a holistic not a piecemeal approach if long-term significant reductions are to be achieved.
Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Strategist, Rob Bernard, addresses exactly this point in a video where he explains the steps that Microsoft is taking to improve the environmental sustainability of a company of 80,000 employees – from improving the power management capabilities of our software through reducing the power requirements of our datacentres by 50% in three years to rolling out one of the world’s largest private bus networks, thus eliminating 25,000 employee commuting miles each and every day.
Posted by Dan
“No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little”. I am sure that the Irish philosopher and politician Edmund Burke (1729-1797) did not have the UK Government’s Green IT Agenda in mind when he articulated this thought. However I think the ethos of his observation is very apposite to the advice in the Cabinet Office paper on Greening Government ICT.
When you examine the 18 recommendations for ICT carbon reduction in Appendix B of the report it is heartening to see that many of the suggestions relate to individual actions that anyone can take with both their work and home PCs. Advice such as ‘shut down PCs after office hours’ may seem blindingly obvious but, even back in 2006 (when energy was comparatively cheap) the National Energy Foundation calculated that each PC left switched on overnight cost £70 in energy per year.
The Microsoft environment site has published today new information on power management features in Vista and a free download of Edison PC power management utility that anyone can use on a home PCs to control your PC’s energy consumption — and subsequently your household’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
As a certain large retailer says (possibly paraphrasing Mr Burke?) – every little helps.
Posted by Ian
According to recent research, 900-1000 laptops go missing every week at Heathrow ... that is 52,000 a year. Worldwide, 800,000 laptops are lost or stolen at airports every year.
Even more incredulously, the research also reveals that many travellers fail to take any steps to protect the information contained on their laptops. Nearly 60 per cent of the British respondents admitted that they did not protect confidential information, while more than half said that they did not back up data.
However, the observation that ‘takes the biscuit’ in the research is: ‘42 percent of British travellers said that their computer went missing after they asked another passenger to keep an eye on it’.
I really want to believe that the research is not accurate but I suspect it is an indication of how lax professional people are with laptops - whether at airports, stations or motorway service areas.
It also reinforces the main challenge with achieving effective information security – people. Every public and commercial sector organisation now has security policies, procedures and technology in place but people do seem to persist in being either careless or too trusting when it comes to being vigilant when using laptops and network-enabled PDAs when travelling on business.
Security is a recurring topic in the Government blog because it is so vital to building citizen trust in government services online. From a Microsoft perspective, the security story relating to our technology has come on leaps and bounds in recent years and I hope you will find these links to practical information on how to secure data on laptops and other advice useful:
· Encrypting data on laptop hard drives using Windows BitLocker
· Getting the security basics right – Get Safe Online
· Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing to improve security, privacy, reliability and business practices
A final reminder - we are running a Microsoft Security Symposium for the Public Sector on September 16th in London. You can review the symposium programme here and register online ... and, if you do attend, we promise to make sure you do not leave your laptop behind...