Photosynth Blog

Take the Olympic Challenge

synthy — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:14:00 GMT

The winter Olympics are less than 3 weeks away. From February 12th to 28th the athletes will be competing in Vancouver and Whistler, and the Photosynth community will be covering the excitement as only we can.

Each day during the Olympics we'll be updating our front page with the best "Olympic Spirit" synths you create. If you get the top spot for a day, your synth will draw at least 3,000 views. And that's not all: our friends over at Bing who manage their beautiful home page, will feature a link to an olympics-related synth if there's a really outstanding one. If that happens -- hold onto your quads -- your synth could get at least 50,000 views on the day it's featured.

Here's how it works:

If you're lucky enough to be going to Vancouver or Whister during the games: let us know! Drop me an email at photosynth@live.com, and tell me what locations or events you're likely to see. We can't help you with tickets, but we can make you famous in the Photosynth community if you capture something wonderful.

For the rest of us who will be watching the games on TV and on the Internet, look for Olympic excitment wherever you are. Are you getting together with friends to watch the opening ceremony? Synth your party! Putting on your own backyard Olympics with non-traditional events? Let's see them!

Submitting a synth for the Olympics Challenge is easy: just tag it olympics and we'll notice it. Check back in with us from February 12th onwards to see the results.

Go for the gold!
David.

How to Succeed in Synthing a Car

synthy — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:57:00 GMT

Most of us who've used Photosynth have tried to synth a car at one time or another. Indeed, there are about 1,500 synths with the "car" tag already.

But if you've tried, you've probably found that car synths often don't work out as well as room synths, art synths, landscape synths, or even people synths. Let's discuss why that is, and what can be done about it.

One of the first steps in the Photosynth processing pipeline is "feature extraction". This is where we analyze each photo and look for areas of interesting texture that we hope can later be matched to textures in other photos. Notice that I said "texture", because Photosynth doesn't look for corners or edges; it looks for areas of visual "roughness". Our feature detection algorithm was inspired by the popular SIFT Algorithm created by David Lowe at UBC.

The problem with cars is that they have very little "visual roughness". Most cars are smooth and shiny, and that leads to very few matchable features. In fact, because if this, we've always said that dirty cars synth better than clean ones. :)

What often happens when synthing a car is that the background gets matched much more than the car, resulting in a very poor point cloud, and a frustrating navigation experience:

It looks like the car got matched, but when you turn off the photos and examine the point cloud...

... only the bushes in the background and the ground on the lower left got matched. Apart from a small patch on the rear door, the car itself was almost invisible to Photosynth. This makes for very poor connectivity and very poor navigation.

Nonetheless, if you pay attention to the following you CAN get some pretty good results. In increasing order of difficulty, Here's what you can try:

How to Shoot a Car Interior (easy)

Set your camera to wide angle
If you can get in the car, sit in the back and do a panorama of the front area. Get at least 65% overlap on all shots.
Take some zoom-ed shots of the instrument cluster, the gear shifter, etc.
Here's a good example.

How to Shoot a Car Exterior (hard)

Cars with lots of detailing will work better than very "clean" cars.
Walk around it at an even distance, and shoot at least 40 photos each showing the whole car. If you can shoot 60 photos, then all the better.
If your angle is from slightly above the car, then you have the opportunity to get lots of ground in your shots. This should anchor the photos, although this will have the side effect that transitions will look a little jerky.
Move in to get closer shots of the wheels, grill, etc. As you move in, take a shot every few feet.
Critical: Add highlights after synthing to make sure that people can get to all the good bits, even if they didn't connect very well.
Here's a good example.

How to Shoot a Booth at an Auto Show (ambitious!)

Find a spot where you have a clear view of the cars you want to include.
Take a wide-angle panoramic series of shots from this position, including all your target cars. Overlap successive shots by 65%.
Walk from the panorama spot in a straight line to the first car, taking shots every 5-10 paces.
Go back to the panorama spot and repeat for each car.
Avoid cars on moving turntables. This confuses Photosynth!
Make one highlight per car once your synth is complete.
If you've got even more energy, combine this technique with the interior and exterior techniques, but limit the total number of photos to ~300.
Here's a good example.

Good luck!
David.

Not on any Map

synthy — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:06:00 GMT

Photosynth is a powerful tool for exploring synthetic spaces as well as real ones.

Today's home page update exposes some interesting Photosynths made completely or partially from synthetic imagery. Rendered scenes, video games, and other virtual reality applications have made for some interesting synths that you won't find on any map. Here's another great one:

I hope that people continue exploring virtual worlds, and even hybrid scenes that blend virtual and photographic imagery.
There is a lot of potential in virtual synths that hasn't been explored yet. Show us what's possible.

Mintz Family Christmas wins "Holiday Lights" Challenge

synthy — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:51:00 GMT

We received 27 submissions for the Holiday Lights Challenge -- a pretty good showing for our first competition.

The winner was the "Mintz Family Christmas". Great decorations, a good capture, and very useful highlights. Fun! Here it is:

The four runners-up were 2009 - Cook Family Christmas Display , Surace Family Christmas Light Display , Metropolis mall - New Year lights , and Holiday Light Display .

Congratulations everybody!

If you like the idea of occasional competitions, please suggest ideas for the next one below.

Photosynth gets Geekbriefed

synthy — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:35:00 GMT

Cali and Neal from Geekbrief.tv visited us in October, and they've just released their video "brief" of Photosynth based on that visit. Here it is:

And here's the synth that was made on-camera during that shoot. My color balance was a little on the sickly yellow side for this one. Sorry Cali!

Seasonal Synth Challenge: "Holiday Lights"

synthy — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:21:00 GMT

Here's the deal. During the week of December 21st to December 27th we will devote our entire front page to your best synths of holiday lights. The winner of this challenge will get his or her synth displayed in the top spot on the front page all week, and 4 runners up will get their synth thumbnails down below. Here's a sample I shot tonight to kick things off:

You might decide to shoot a Christmas tree, a decorated house, the most festive street in your neighborhood, or whatever. Frankly, the wierder the better. Just as long as it features lots of little lights!. To enter, all you need to do is create a synth and tag it "holidaylights".

Judging
Make sure that your synth is in and tagged "holidaylights" by 9:00pm Pacific US time on Sunday December 20th. On Monday morning 21st the Photosynth team will pick the winners. Judging will be based on: 1. Great photography (good composition, exposure, color balance); 2. Good synthyness (100% not required, but needs to be at least somewhat synthy). 3. Creative -- surprise us!

Update
As of Monday 14th, there have been 12 synths submitted. Here they are. Keep 'em coming!

This should be fun. Any questions?

David.

Photosynths in Bing Maps. Dive in!

synthy — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Today marks the beta release of the all new Silverlight-based version of Bing Maps, and one of the most visible features on this new site is deep Photosynth integration. The best geotagged photosynths from our community are explorable in Bing Maps in all their synthy goodness -- that's more than 14,000 Photosynths, and 1,435,000 photos.

If you want the full story on everything in this new maps release, check out the official Bing Maps blog. Continue on here to see more details on how Photosynth enhances the maps.

As with most things synthy, words aren't the best way to communicate the experience. Instead, take a look at this one minute video of "diving in" to a synth from Bing Maps.

Want to try it yourself? Here's a link that positions you on Beta Bing Maps exactly where the video starts.

Coverage
The Photosynth community has spread to the far corners of the globe in the 16 months we've been live, and the 14,000 geotagged synths cover all the world's major landmarks and many of the minor ones too.

Going to New York? There are more than a hundred synths in lower Manhattan alone.

OK, but what about some remote spot like Easter Island in the south eastern corner of the Pacific Ocean? A couple of intrepid archeologists have created at least 13 great synths of the ancient stone statues of Easter island:

Cool. But what's it good for?
The URL of our Beta Bing Maps site is bing.com/maps/explore, and that last word holds the key to why we've made Photosynth a first class imagery type for Bing Maps. More than any other photo technology, Photosynth offers the promise of really taking you inside the Sistene Chapel, showing you the texture of the rock at Uluru, or circumnavigating the great Cologne Cathederal. Exploring the streets of major US cities with the new Streetside map view gives viewers a real feeling of "being there", but to deeply explore landmarks, public spaces, and the glorious details of world, you need to put powerful tools in the hands of the people who love these places. We think Photosynth is the best technology in the world for this task, and from the amazing output of our community, we think you agree.

A Small Mystery Revealed
In our October update we released a feature in the editor called "geoalignment", which takes geotagging to the next level. The geoalignment process establishes a true size and orientation of the Photosynth point cloud. It's the mechanism behind the effect in the video above where the map rotates to the perfect approach angle for Haystack Rock off Cannon Beach. When we released the geoalignment tool a couple of months ago, we couldn't pre-announce the details this update to Bing Maps, so geoalignment was a bit of a mystery to our community. Not surprisingly, many of you didn't bother with it, but we did, and we even geoaligned some of your great synths to ensure they'd show as well as possible in this new maps release. The Photosynth elves have been burning the midnight oil getting ready for today's launch!

So How Do I get my Synth Featured?
If you've played around with the new maps site you'll notice that there are more than 300 synths in London, but only one of them is featured on the Bing Maps page if you search for "London, UK". So who's choosing? Good question!

Initially, the Phoytosynth team is making editorial choices -- trying to choose synths that are well photographed and show landmarks that a visitor to that place would be interested in. Obviously this is pretty subjective, and we expect lots of discussion in our forum on the topic! If you have a suggestion for a synth that should be featured for any particular location, please propose it on our dedicated forum thread.

Longer term, the right answer is to let our community vote on which synths to feature for a given location. Look for a dedicated blog post on this subject in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, please explore our new Maps release, and tell us what you think.

Happy Holidays
from the Photosynth team.

New release and a new UI

synthy — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:10:00 GMT

The newest version of Photosynth is now live. There's nothing earth shattering in it (we're still hard at work on that). I did want to let you all know about some of the more noticeable changes, though.

You'll see that the new, cleaner UI looks like this:

All the controls are still here, starting from the left with the transport controls: Back, Play, Next

In the center is the navigation disk. I think it's easier to use the white quads in the scene to navigate, but a lot of people still like the arrows.

Next to that of course are the zoom buttons, followed by help (more about that later) and then the view control and full screen.

The view control is our biggest change. On hover it looks like this:

It allows quick access to the different ways of viewing a synth: the normal 3D (synth) view, Overhead view, the 2D photo grid and the Point Cloud only view. This is also the first time we've had a UI control to get to the Point Cloud only view!

Help

We've seen firsthand that many people don't know what to do with Photosynth when they encounter it. The help panel is our initial take at addressing the problem. Since Photosynth is still new to many, we thought it would be good to have some of the basic controls explained right away.

Yes, it comes up on load, and I know many of you will hate me for it. Just select 'Don’t Show Again' and you won't be bothered by it again.

Zooming Performance

The last change you might notice is the improved download of imagery when you zoom. We made some changes to our download queues so that images resolve faster when you zoom in to see the details.

Happy Synthing and look for more announcements here soon!

-Jonathan

Aaron's Love of Balls

synthy — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:42:00 GMT

Hello! I am Aaron Rincover, user experience designer at Bing maps and Photosynth. Today’s homepage photosynth selections are based on my love of spherical objects. Although they are all based on the sphere, each one tells a unique story. Through materials, textures, scales, colors and locations they convey feelings to the viewer. What I find interesting about photosynth is the ability to capture and replicate this 3 dimensional experience. Photosynths tell stories in ways that are not possible with any other medium.

"You know my methods, Watson"

synthy — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:34:00 GMT

Dr. Watson didn't have access to Photosynth as a forensic tool in his day, but the makers of the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie (opens Christmas Day) certainly do.

They've created a fascinating multi-episode game to promote the movie. It features a new Photosynth every week until the movie opens. Each of them were shot on set, and you need to explore them very carefully indeed to solve the mystery. Go to http://221b.sh/ to play the game.

Here's a teaser to get you in the mood to explore the dark underbelly of 1890s London via Photosynth.

Elementary? I think not.

Memories of the Berlin Wall

synthy — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:02:00 GMT

Contributed by Gerold Hübner, whom I met when I was photographing this section of the wall in the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, Washington.

What does it mean to me as a German citizen standing right next to a real piece of the Berlin Wall here in the United States? Spontaneously there are mixed feelings. I was fortunate having had the chance to grow up in west Germany. So the Wall did not have as much impact on my life as it would have had if I lived in the former east Germany or east Berlin.

I had the freedom to travel anywhere where I wanted even though my limited revenues prevented me from going everywhere, unfortunately. But I cannot complain: I wanted to be a foreign exchange student in the US. And I really ended up as one in Mesa, Arizona, where graduated from high school in 1978.

Standing here next to the Wall it reminds me that my fellow citizens from east Germany back then have not had this privilege of freedom. It reminds me that the Wall was an unnatural barrier that prevented me, my sister and my brother from getting to know our uncles and cousins who lived behind the curtain. I remember my mother sending them packages with stuff that typically was not readily available in east Germany, e. g. good coffee, candy or modern clothes. I met my uncle only once, when he was allowed to travel to my grandmother’s funeral – without his wife and kids, who had to stay in east Germany to make sure he returned.

Back then and even shortly until the Wall came down it was very hard to believe that Germany would be re-united again some time. When it happened it took a while to realize this is for real. It felt good though. The east German Government kept its citizens like prisoners in our own country. A state like that does not deserve to exist. The day the Wall fell was a very happy day for me and everybody I know. There was some uncertainty during the first weeks after the Wall come open about how the other western countries would react to unified and potentially stronger Germany in the center of Europe. However, the was overwhelmingly large support for the German re-unification from all over that made me quite optimistic very soon.

The Wall is a piece of German history. One we would have liked to miss! It feels good and right that it is gone now. And when you are in Berlin looking for rests of the Wall you’ll have a very hard time finding some. It’s easier here in Redmond!

Welcoming Windows 7 in Wet, Windy, New Zealand

synthy — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:29:00 GMT

Today, October 22nd, is Windows 7 Launch day. And New Zealand, being just west of the International Date Line, was the first country to kick off the festivities.

The NZ Microsoft team have made interesting use of Photosynth before, and this time they've made two great synth of their colorful (or should I say colourful) events. Here's a video of the two synths they made, and below it is the Aukland synth for your enjoyment.

From a technical point of view, it's quite suprising how well Photosynth did with the tight shots of the sea of umbrellas. The umbrellas are fairly featureless, and many of them would have moved a little between successive shots. Nonetheless, Photosynth found enough in common that it was just able to reconstruct the scene. The strange transitions between many of the highligts comes from this very fragile connectivity.

Extra credit to those who come from non-Rubgy-playing countries and know who Richie McCaw is, and why he appeared at the event.

A New Angle on Photosynth

synthy — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:13:00 GMT

Today the Photostynth team has released a major new feature and a slew of small improvements.

New Feature: Overhead View

Have you ever wanted to look down on Mt Rushmore from directly above the Presidents? What about seeing the exact layout of Stonehenge from above? If you’ve used Photosynth you know that it automatically calculates a “cloud” of 3D points representing the features matched between photos. Our new overhead view lets you turn the photos off, and puts your point of view immediately above the scene. Here’s what I’m talking about:

Overhead view of RHaddlesey’s synth of Stonehenge.

But it gets better. Overhead view is not just for checking out the geometry of your scene, it’s also a quick way to navigate to other parts of it. The screenshot below shows the mouse hovering over a region, and one of the photos covering that region is shown as a thumbnail. Click your mouse, and you get a great transition into the 3D experience starting with that photo. Pretty cool, eh?

Detail from Charlpe’s synth of Mesa Verde

Static screenshots don’t really do Photosynth overhead view justice. Here’s a short video we made to show the feature in action.

Other Improvements

Not as flashy, but just as important, is the work we've done behind the scenes. Here are the highlights:

· An all-new, Silverlight-3 based viewer. It's noticably smoother and makes fewer network requests, so performance is better.

· The “View” button on the synther now automatically logs you in to the Web site and takes you directly into the editor so that you can complete title/description, and give your synth highlights and a geotag.

· Geotagging is now easier and you can even scale and rotate your synth in the map in a process we call “geoalignment”

· Multiword search no longer sucks. That’s harsh, but if you’ve ever tried to find a synth of “Green Lake” or “Smith Rock”, you would have been as frustrated as we were. It’s now much better.

Hope you enjoy this new work. Tells us what you think by leaving a comment below, or on our forum.

Good synthing,

David Gedye and the Photosynth Team.

Picture the Impossible

synthy — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:23:00 GMT

Less than two weeks ago, an alternate reality game created by the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle newspaper called " Picture the Impossible" began. Intended to engage members of the community in an exploration of Rochester, different games and activities were designed for the competition.

One of the challenges in the game was to create the best Photosynth of one of the 'Horses on Parade' sculptures in Rochester, NY. The competition is done and the results are in! They had nearly 150 entries in total.

I want to take the opportunity to thank and congratulate the participants and winners of the "Picture the Impossible Photosynth Horses' challenge.

Here are the winners' synths:

Tazwalker:

klesko86:

Poinky:

igator210:

Thanks to Bing for sponsoring the technical development for the games, and Elizabeth Lawley for promoting the use of Photosynth within them.

-Jonathan

Update to the Photosynth Terms of Use

synthy — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:10:00 GMT

Last week we released a minor update to our site that included a change to our Terms of Use. The change is that the following sentence was added to section 6:

Microsoft may use and display your materials posted on public areas of the service in Windows Live, Bing, MSN, or in any future online services.

What this means is that in the future we may promote Photosynth, and your public synths in particular, by embedding them in other online services from Microsoft. If this sounds a bit mysterious, it’s all about bringing the amazing power of Photosynth to capture places or objects to a wider audience than just the visitors of our site.

Important note: This only affects your public synths. People will never find your unlisted synths on the Photosynth site, or on any other Microsoft site. So, if you are not comfortable having your synths used in this way, you can always make them unlisted.

Yours truly,

David Gedye

Photosynth Group Program Manager

Microsoft.