Photosynth, Part 2

Even though I only two days ago posted about the cool, amazing new technology called PhotoSynth, I've since learned a bit more about it and just gotta share.

First, if you haven't yet seen the video from the TED conference, do so here or here.

Then if you want to play with a trial of this yourself, you can do so at http://labs.live.com/photosynth/default.html (Note: there are minimum system requirements to do so). And there is more than one collection you can play with -- click the collections to see more.

Then to learn more about the project, see the videos at this page.... the first two are particularly worthwhile.

This is something out of a futuristic sci-fi movie. Question: when will see this used on an episode of 24, or a big movie? I bet pretty soon...

Another thing I wonder about here... so far, what we are seeing is mostly focused on buildings, and buildings that aren't changing much. But of course buildings do change over time, so that would throw a complication into the mix -- you could have photographs from two years, where part of the building is the same in each, but say a corner has been remodeled in one because it was taken a year later after some construction work. So if both photos were in the dataset or collection, then I wonder what would happen to the 3D model created? There would be this conflict from these two photos I think.

Another thing that occurs to me is... wouldn't it be great to have a photosynth collection from something that doesn't exist any more? Some building or place that doesn't exist any longer (a favorite sports stadium that has been demolished, or main street of Deadwood in the late 1800s, or whatever), and if you had enough photos of it from a certain time period where there was enough consistency for it to work (per question above), then you could reconstruct a 3D space from those photos pretty accurately using this photosynth technology.

I'm quite sure some really creative people are going to find really interesting applications for this in the near future, stuff I can't even imagine. And could there be uses for it... in business? in the military? Lotsa possibilities I think...