Nigel Parker's Outside Line : Photosynth

Air New Zealand Fashion Week Finale!

nparker — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 08:27:00 GMT

I convinced Michael Ng (the official photographer) for Air New Zealand Fashion week to attempt a photosynth at last nights Stolen Girlfriends show. I think he did a great job! Showing the models and the who’s who celebs in the front row.

Add this with some super high resolution beauty shots

in the MSN “wall of fashion” and the kooky Pamela Anderson (warning semi nudity on the link) below

With that we round out Air New Zealand Fashion Week with a photo wall that contains 593 photos, 156,680 files, 2.68GB.

I previously released the source code and talked about how I built the viewer.

TBWA, adidas, the ALL BLACKS and Photosynth

nparker — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 03:01:00 GMT

TBWA have teamed up with adidas to launch the 2009 All Black jersey with a new campaign.

This is how it works:

1) Buy the 2009 All Black jersey to go into the draw to photograph the All Blacks during the national anthem at one of the home test matches.

2) The photos are then loaded into photosynth and embedded on the adidas website.

3) At the end of the home matches the photos are going to be used to build a stylised 10th Anniversary adidas ALL BLACKS poster.

As a side note I have been working with TBWA/Shift and David Gedye (Group Manager for Photosynth & best known as the original founder of the SETI@home project) on the scoping phase of this project. If you look at the second synth of the All Blacks vs Italy you’ll see improvements to the approach over what is currently published on the adidas website.

Just like in Christchurch at the sell out first Bledisloe Cup match in Auckland 500 disposable cameras were given out to the public when they entered the ground. More than 160 of the cameras were returned and form part of the resulting synth that you can check out at http://tr.im/RichieMcCaw (also embedded on the adidas.com site). You can see the difference in quality of the pro shots and the “low fi” film shots taken by fans.

Incidentally before the match the competition was explained and the campaign video was played out on the big screen.

TBWA worked with Jonah Lomu (rugby legend) to explain photosynth and the latest crowd sourced All Blacks poster. I noticed that Andy Blood chose to embed a quicktime video in the page so I thought I’d use one of the new Expression Encoder 3 templates to play that same MP4 video using Silverlight below.

All the tweeting during the match was enough to get the term “All Blacks” as the #2 trending topic on twitter around the world!

I’m excited to see photosynth being adopted by large companies, events, magazines (caution link contains bikinis) and innovative execution. Done right this technology forms the basis of a very solid campaign.

Add geo-location and Bing Maps 3D and we are starting to get something really quite special!

As an alternative experience the amazing team at Soul Solutions in Australia have created a prototype that enables photosynth to work natively on Bing Maps using Silverlight. You can try it out for yourself at http://photosynth.soulsolutions.com.au.

At a time when new media agencies are trying to differentiate themselves and fight shrinking budgets, innovative solutions like Silverlight & photosynth can really play their part. I don’t know the cost of this campaign but I can only guess that it is substantially less than the ambitious $1.3 million campaign that Sanitarium took on to leverage their sponsorship of the 2009 All Blacks.

NZsynth – How It Was Done

nparker — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:10:26 GMT

Previously I wrote and demoed the NZsynth application that was built for the WEB09 keynote. This post is detailing how it was made and introducing version two (Zoom all the way in using mouse wheel then double-click for popup image).

WATCH THE VIDEO that goes end-to-end on the development of the application (mainly building the mosaic and the extension that Tim Tate created to make the tiles clickable).

The video is also downloadable from Channel9

The Code

It goes without saying that this code is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights it is demo ware and should be treated as such.

Flickr Image Download Code

Mosaic WCF REST Service (Including Flickr Database File)

NZsynth

Demo at http://possi.bility.co.nz/ Hot keys in previous post

Tim’s Silverlight 3 Code and Demo

There is no “go live” for Silverlight 3 yet so what I’m going to do next is for “informational/ testing purposes only”. If you are a developer and happen to have either the Silverlight 3 Beta - Windows Developer Runtime or the Silverlight 3 Beta - Mac Developer Runtime installed pop over to http://possi.bility.co.nz/timtate/ to look at a running version of Tim’s solution.

NZsynth V2 Source (excluding image tiles)

Demo at http://possi.bility.co.nz/nzsynth (Zoom right in using mouse wheel then double-click for popup image)

Key tools

WEBPI to install Visual Studio Silverlight Development Tools & SQL Server 2008 Express
AndreaMosaic
HD Make
Deep Zoom Composer
WCF REST Starter Kit
FlickrNet

Other Resources/ Examples

Jellyfish Deep Zoom
Deep Zoom Image Generation with DeepZoomTools.DLL
My post DeepZoom-Tastic
http://tr.im/photosEFAS (DeepZoom Pix Photos from Expression for Art’s Sake)
Miss March and Other Distractions (Parental Advisory)
Deep Zoom++ : Build Dynamic Deep Zoom Applications with Open Source

All this got me thinking how this idea could be extended further?

National Geographic have been doing some interesting work with photosynth recently. Check out the Sphinx below.

This is why I was intrigued to see they too have developed a mosaic experience called Infinite Photograph. It is not as smooth or free flowing as the nzsynth mosaic demo but it has a great touch that it repeats on itself after a few layers giving you a “feeling” that you can zoom forever. Also double-clicking images brings up more details like in Tim and my examples.

I guess beyond this we then need to think about video and using dynamic frames in a form of “massive” stop motion animation. If you haven’t seen it yet the YouTube Mosaic Music Video may give you some insight into where my mind is heading.

NZsynth and WEB09

nparker — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:56:00 GMT

It started as a conversation I was having with Brett Roberts regarding options for promoting NZ online at a time when tourism was taking a hit from the current economic climate. From there we discussed the proposed National Cycleway and this lead to a conversation about “crowd sourcing” images that people have already tagged as New Zealand to construct a demo from our shipping Silverlight 2 technology.

This conversation tied in well with a looming keynote slot at WEB09 where I had a 5-10 minute demo slot. The biggest problem was that I only had three days to build the “demo-ware” prototype and present it to a room full of web influential's!

Needless to say after a nervous period fighting with the failing conference WiFi. I switched to the hotel wireless and pulled it off!

Watch a 6 1/2 minute video of the demo I showed at the conference (this time the video is hosted on a US based server so the experience won’t be as good for Kiwis as the demo further down this post).

I have also posted this video on Vimeo (download available).

The demo app is hosted on a development server at Swizzle in their Telstra Albany datacenter. The fact that server was only 1 hop away from the conference venue meant that I could stream video via wireless at 2.4 MBS over the hotel wifi using smooth streaming with NO CACHE! I would go as far as saying that this was the Best Quality Internet Video that people in the room had ever seen stream over the Internet and all this in an environment when no other presenter could get their “US” based video to play without buffering! Goes to show the importance of peering for local content!

As mentioned at the event the “Excellent" video was generously provided by Making Movies for use as stock footage in the demo.

If you are in New Zealand and have a direct connection to the Auckland Peering Exchange I recommend that you try the demo steps for yourself by navigating to http://possi.bility.co.nz.

WEB09 Demo V1

1) Use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out of the Mosaic and the slider to switch between Mosaics with more or less tiles.

Needless to say there was some smoke and mirrors in play during the demo…

Key combinations to try

SPACE bring up photo, mouse click on the image to hide again.
Q to show my photo collection (click on faded background then W to hide)
A to show a photosynth of museum S to hide
Z to show a photosynth of statue (P inside the photosynth to hide photos and show 3d model) S to hide
X to show a photosynth of blackout protest
V to show smooth stream video B to hide (needs to be done last)

In retrospect I didn’t like the way that the watermarked text that I applied to each individual photo tile looked after it was added to the mosaic. Also the tiles were being cut when they were being laid out in the Mosaic so in some cases (like below) the watermark attribution was being partly obscured or not visible at all!

For stage two I wanted to figure out a way to get rid of the watermark all together and work out a way to make individual photos in the Mosaic clickable.

I hadn’t been able to solve this problem in my demo so I used SPACE to bring up a single photo to show my thinking but not having it working.

Tim Tait came up to me after the keynote and we started discussing how I had built the demo and how he could look at productionizing the code for an upcoming exhibition at Te Papa museum in Wellington. Following our conversation I invited Tim to the Expression For Art’s Sake event in Wellington the following week and the rest as you say is history. Tim was able to solve the big problem I had above and this lead to me building a V2 of my demo which I will show you soon.

Tim wrote:

Before this week I had hardly touched Silverlight and now I don’t think I can live without it. Even though Silverlight is very different from Flash, I think having that Flash background let me pick it up fairly quickly.

I will post again shortly with a more detailed description of how I built the demo above including source code and a preview of Version 2 inspired by Tim’s work. But in the meantime it worth calling out the great piece of software Andrea Mosaic that I purchased to pull the base 3 Gigapixel tile sets.

Read Part Two about how it was done…

Photo(synth)sister

nparker — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:30:00 GMT

Now that Photosynth has been released I couldn't resist making a halosynth powered photosister!

Hint hold down ctrl and play with the 3D model!

BBC and Photosynth

nparker — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 06:44:00 GMT

The BBC is using Microsoft's Photosynth 3D imaging software to provide views of prominent British buildings in conjunction with a new TV show, How We Built Britain.

Check it out!, blog post here.

The Photosynth images will be updated with new photos submitted by the public. The BBC is using Flickr for image uploads.

VERY COOL!

Photosynth was one of the technologies that blew me away when I first saw it at last years Microsoft Global Exchange event that I attended in Orlando.

Expand Your Portfolio... it's a wrap!

nparker — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 15:09:00 GMT

Hey there,

Two weeks ago we met and presented to over 200 people from more than 85 companies across New Zealand!

We got some great feedback and had heaps of fun doing it!

I have got great feedback via email and I have had truck loads of people wanting to show their friends... learn more and try things out themselves!

What sites did we update/release?

http://www.microsoft.com/expression

http://www.microsoft.com/design

http://www.microsoft.com/wpfe

What did I showcase last week...

WPF

firstlook.nytimes.com

Blend (Beta 1)

thirteen23.com, harmony (itunes/Amazon desktop mashup), denounce (next gen rss/podcast reader)

Tools

SWF2XAML (v1), demo, video

AItoXAML

Expression Web (Available Now)

personifydesign.com

ASP.NET AJAX (Release Candidate)

sample sites, from NZ - http://ecobob.com

Vista Media Center

mobilewares, Media Center Extender Video

Sidebar

Building a WPF Vista Sidebar Gadget, Gadgets

WPF/E (Community Preview)

Playground, Flash/ WPF/E coexist

Windows Live

Fresh Logic Studio GPS Mashup

Queenstown 3D video, Virtual Earth 3D

Photosynth

Where are my custom demos?

Demonstrating Designer & Developer Workflow using a 3D Kiwi, code

NZ Vector Animation in XAML (requires .NET 3.0 Runtime Installed)

"experience is the product" video presentation (rough cut, includes preview of Right Hemispheres upcoming version of Deep Publish)

Rapid prototyping using XAML and Blend (requires .NET 3.0 Runtime Installed)

Where can you go to learn?

Back in June I blogged about learning WPF, after Tech.Ed I also posted a bunch of my videos (including the Tablet Montage) showcasing WPF.

The community site for Windows Presentation Foundation - http://wpf.netfx3.com

Videos for the release candidate of ASP.NET AJAX

Training for the Expresion tools

What has been released since?

Microsoft Robotics Studio Version 1

XNA Game Studio Express Version 1, Sharky (local XNA game developer)

3D Tools for the Windows Presentation Foundation - Example

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1

Show me the video of what people are using WPF for.

5 minute overview video

Where is this conversation going next?

To Vegas Baby... April 30th - May 2nd.

Who do you recognise from "Mix and Mash"?

The person next to BillG looks like someone that I met at WebStock in March... what do you think?

Take some time over Christmas to pass that Suck Threshold.

Merry Christmas

Photosynth

nparker — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 00:30:00 GMT

One of the true pieces of innovation I saw when I was up in Orlando a few months ago was Photosynth.

What is Photosynth in a nutshell? It is the ability to create a 3D model from thousands of photographs.

Think about this for a moment, take something like a set of photos about the Auckland Sky Tower, run these through Photosynth and get a 3D model.

Combine this with Virtual Earth 3D and you are starting to see the scope of this vision.

Try Photosynth for yourself today.