Microsoft revolutionises viewing digital photos

Here there be Seadragons
Seadragon streams ‘multi-gigapixel’ images optimised for the display in use over any bandwidth link. What this means in practice is that you will be able to view a scene of, say, a museum, on your mobile phone, PDA or tablet PC, then select and zoom in on a vase, then look at detailed engraving on the handle – all at full resolution and with no delay.

Slideshows provide another way of exploring the 3D photo space. Photosynth will offer two slideshow formats, a spatial option that moves from one image to the next pausing for a few moments at each, and ‘Stabilized’ slideshows.

These lock the camera to the current viewpoint displaying alternate images that share the same location. Stabilized slideshows could be used to view changes over time, showing a garden throughout the seasons, or the ebb and flow of a tidal estuary, for example.

If you want to see Photosynth in action you’ll have to be patient. At the time of writing Microsoft announced that it is releasing an ActiveX browser control that will work on pre-processed image collections. In other words you’ll be able to look at scenes created by Microsoft, but you won’t be able to register new photos to those scenes or produce your own scenes.

Before that can happen Microsoft will have to work on reducing the processing time so that large collections of images can be analysed in seconds or, at the very least minutes, rather than the hours or days it currently takes. It seems pretty confident that it can do this, stating “ultimately, we wish to scale up our reconstruction algorithm to handle millions of photographs”.

If that happens, the potential for Photosynth looks to be huge. It’s tempting when looking at technology developments such as this to get carried away with the possibilities, but it’s clear that the most interesting applications are the large-scale collaborative ones.

It’s telling that the developers have chosen Flickr as the source of their test material. The sheer quantity of photos available on Flickr makes it an ideal resource for global image-based applications such as Photosynth.

Flickr photos are tagged, so subject-based searching is straightforward and Flickr’s recent introduction of geotagging, which pinpoints the precise geographical location at which a photo was taken and positions it on Yahoo maps, will make its content more accessible to applications like Photosynth.

It will be interesting to see where this goes. Microsoft plans to release the Photosynth application as a free download and the idea of a collaborative 3D ‘Photosynth world’ built by individuals registering their own photo collections is an attractive one.

Something along the lines of the Google Maps Community layer might be more realistic, though. The prospect of viewing say, a beach in Northern France and moving back in time from the view of holidaymakers enjoying the sunshine to the D-Day landings is hard not to get excited about.

Never mind the quality, feel the copyright
However it pans out, aside from the technical hurdles, there are other potential obstacles that Photosynth will have to overcome. Quality is one. Cynics see Photosynth as offering little more than 3D wallpaper comprised of a stack of poor-quality snapshots. This aside, there is the question of commercial rights.

One of the Photosynth trials used a series of shots of Trafalgar Square sourced from Flickr users. While tourists are free to snap away in Trafalgar Square, photography in connection with any business is prohibited without a permit.

Similar restrictions apply at many other tourist sites and, although at the time of taking there may have been no intention to make commercial use of such photos, their subsequent appearance on a Photosynth site that, for example, carried advertising would contravene such restrictions.

Commercial Photosynth ‘virtual tours’ wouldn’t have these problems, so it seems more probable that we can look forward to high-quality professionally shot Photosynth tours of every tourist site on the globe. Worthwhile as it is, this somehow seems a less organic, inclusive and exciting prospect than global community-based Photosynth projects.

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