I almost ashamed for posting this, I'm in a strongly anti Microsoft Mood, but, well, this is an interesting gimmick that could be useful to some. http://photosynth.net/default.aspx They call it Photosynth, I'd describe it like an automatic panoramic stitching program on steroids that is then combined with a viewing application that is like Quicktime VR with the ability to handle pictures from different locations. Big disclaimer, it's for Windows operating systems only, XP or Vista. No big surprise there, I suppose. What that actually means is you can take pictures, say, all around a structure such as Cinderella Castle. Move around it and get complete coverage from all angles, take LOTS of pictures. Then feed them into the Photosynth application (currently it requires you to upload what you shoot, no offline mode, so anything you do will be visible to all) and this very cleverly coded program tries to construct a 3d model of what you're shooting and then figures out where each picture was taken and links them together. You can click on the outlines of other images when you're looking at one and it'll do a sort of zoom scale rotate thing to transition to the other image. It doesn't have to be regular though, angles can change, you could throw in closeups, whatever. Navigating through the images is awkward, I hope they can further improve that. Quicktime VR and similar systems are limited compared to this, but it's a smooth, seamless process at least. The thing about this that really excites me is the fact that this gimmicky little program can construct a partial 3d model (a point cloud, individual points modeled in 3 dimensions but without any sort of surface modeling so far) of things, apparently completely automatically, by feeding it a bunch of pictures. That's amazing, it's a beautiful trick of image processing. Check this out: http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=e5c ... d23223844e Once the plug in programs have been loaded, load up the image, hold the control key on your keyboard, and then use the mouse to grab that 3d rendered donut in the center of the screen and rotate it around. Look at the detail in that point cloud. Stonehenge modeled in 3d, completely automatically. Okay, so the process isn't perfect: http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=a5a ... cc8de66702 The castle. It's messed up, the 3d reconstruction is off. I think I may have found a few errors in the Stonehenge model even, but it's not this blatant. So the 3d reconstruction isn't always perfect, the navigation system is clumsy, and it's really a big gimmick. But surely you can think of some things to do with this. I'm picturing something like an elaborately covered Main Street USA, with close ups of the names in the windows. I fear that moving crowds might throw it off, although I found a decent synth of a parade at Hollywood Studios that deals with the moving parade characters, so maybe it could work. They'd be cheating themselves if they didn't develop the 3d reconstruction part of the system into a 3d modeling tool, I assume that that's also being worked on. But the current application as it is is at least an interesting toy, perhaps a way to display photographs of some subjects and navigate through them in a new way. As one other free MS app link, check this out: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/ ... s/ivm/ICE/ It looks like a panoramic photo stitcher, perhaps a way to make more conventional QTVR style panos. There are many excellent free programs out there that can accomplish this, but some of them are rather cryptic. I haven't used this, but I assume that this program will be a bit more simplified and easier to use. I'm passing it on because I ran into a mention of it in the same forum post that reminded me about Photosynth (I'd heard about it before, but at the time it was in a viewer only phase, you couldn't make your own).
