There’s a special place in my heart for Photosynth. I feel like it’s a sibling that left the house and damnit, is going to live however it wants. Our teams used to be one, working side by side to deliver glorious experiences, and are now separated by a massive gulf on the org chart. In any case, I like what they have done, and continue to do.
Speaking of which, they’ve introduced a cool new feature in their latest update, the overhead view. They turn off images, take you up top and show you the point cloud in all of its glory. I’d talk more about it, but David Gedye says it much better than I possibly could in the video below. Listen to what he has to say, and check out their blog post for some additional information and smaller features.
Another exciting development in the Photosynth-o-sphere (yeah, I went there), is cool tech from GRAIL, the University of Washington department that helped with the original Photosynth code. They’ve tweaked the algorithm used to match photos to make it much faster and able to handle more than a few hundred or thousand images. The result is simply stunning, synths of entire cities instead of individual scenes or monuments. Check it out:
