Having lived through BETT last week, I had to relive it again this morning when Mark A’Bear showed me his Photosynth of the BETT stand. He’d snapped 278 photos of Olympia, and Photosynth had them stitched them together into an explorable photo model.
It’s just like being there – but without the noise, crowds and freebies.
I couldn’t help noticing that CNN had created a big inauguration Photosynth too, were they had asked members of the public to send in their photos, and they’d then popped them all into Photosynth to make a massive diorama that you can browse around and explore. And on the main Photosynth site, there are piles of others, some created by individual people from a single perspective, others by groups of people together. And they’re all overlayed on a map of Washington so that you can navigate amongst them.
This is a big step for social networking and digital photography, because it is more than just people sharing photographs on a site like Flickr or FaceBook, but actually ties the images together to create perspectives that no single person could have seen.
I spent a few minutes on the Grand Hall gallery too and have come up with http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=20109C59-AC83-409D-A474-70070D289812. A good start and more to come.