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Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth (Awesome!)

labs.live.com — Ever wondered what it would be like to walk through your digital photos in 3D or see what hundreds of other people shot at the same location? See Photosynth in action and hear how Live Labs is exploring new ways to change the way you think about the web.

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  • jfanaian, on 10/12/2007, -7/+42Thats pretty freaking sweet, I can't wait to be able to play with that.
  • FunkstarDeLux, on 10/12/2007, -6/+20This looks incredible...
  • dec0ded, on 10/12/2007, -3/+28My only question is how are the initial 3d environments created, is it dynamic or will someone have to spend time placing each image separately?

    Looks like they already answered my question..

    "Each photo is processed by computer vision algorithms to extract hundreds of distinctive features, like the corner of a window frame or a doorhandle. Then, photos that share features are linked together in a web. When a feature’s found in multiple images, its 3D position can be calculated. It’s similar to depth perception—what your brain does to perceive the 3D positions of things in your field of view based on their images in both of your eyes. Photosynth’s 3D model is just the cloud of points showing where those features are in space."
    • joeshlub, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8How many photos of the same area would this actually take to make anything worth while?
    • liquidrums, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19I hope user photos are approved and not automatically inserted. If you had a connecting photo, you could insert tubgirl or goatse into the middle, while the seams of the photo still matches the scene, and voila! Millions lose their lunch.
    • rhinopig, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Yeah. While in theory i guess you could link any 2 images that overlapped (like the brain), my question is what about time and lighting and movement?

      For example in there demo they just used one (large) set of photos taken at the same time, but how well would it work with 1 picture taken at noon and one at night? what about on a sunny day and and a rainy one? How do the people in the foreground effect it's ability to link images? construction scaffolding? etc.

      Just linking a bunch of photos from one photo shoot seems pretty trivial, but their apparent goal of linking any 2 pictures regardless of who took them, when, at what quality, etc. seems much more far off (not impossible, but the video didn't show anything to that effect. just said 'what if').
    • alwaysmc2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5@rhinopig
      I was thinking that too. They would probably only link photos that are really high resolution. As for weather, maybe they can detect that too and you can choose what you want the ambiance to be like. That'd be cool. :)
    • Mr.Scientist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7@rhinopig: There's a pretty nifty algorithm called SIFT (Scale invariant feature transform: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transform ). That algorithm detects characteristic image features regardless of image rotation and resolution and is relatively robust against illumination variation. It seems like an ideal candidate for what Photosynth does. They take a bunch of pictures, extract characteristic features and match them with features in other pictures. Then they have a huge equation system of rays through the scene with camera and feature positions as unknowns and feature matches as constraints. After solving that equation system, they get the point cloud that you see in the video. Then it's only a matter of selecting the right images (filter for camera position and angle) and showing images at the appropriate depth. I bet the devil is in the details, but in a nutshell that's what's going on.
    • FelixdaaHack, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Photosynth vs. Google Earth?
  • overkil6, on 10/12/2007, -12/+9Has Microsoft bitten off too much here? I think one guy said if we could collect all the worlds photo's... and THEN create a 3D image/environment? Could Google's farm even do this?
    • mephitix, on 10/12/2007, -1/+32Eh, they're thinking from a high-level point of view since this is a prototype. It's always best to think outside of the box and then try to fit it into your strategy instead of always worrying about resources and never being able to think creatively.
  • lastberserker, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Check also this link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=afe093ae-b780-4ee0-b0f1-897dfd42f0f9&DisplayLang=en
    • ilyag, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16In case someone gets too excited... That's not the software, that's just more video demonstrations.
    • DonPMitchell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I second that comment about Digital Image Suit 2006. I do a lot of work with panoramic stitching, and the Microsoft tool is by far the best. It handles zooming, rotating and panning, which I've never seen anyone else do.

      It's a myth that Microsoft is not creative. Any company that writes and improves software is being creative. Journalists and amateurs just don't comprehend what programmers and engineers do for a living.
  • neocitron, on 10/12/2007, -24/+2This is astounding, especially coming from Microsoft, i wouldn't expect anything art related like this.... i want this app.
    • ConceptJunkie, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14Microsoft Research is working on tons of really cool stuff, 98% of which you never hear about. This is a perfect example, although hopefully this will turn out to be more than vapor. Despite everything you hear about Microsoft (and believe me, I'm no fan of the company in general), their research group does some groundbreaking stuff.

    • lastberserker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@ConceptJunkie: a lot of MSR stuff makes it into mainstream software. For example, their research in stitching images made it into Digital Image Suit 2006, which frankly kicks @ss of great and mightly PanoTools in the hands of average user. Their work on automatic source code verification made it into the last Visual Studio. A lot of their work is in one way or another manifests itself in live.com projects. And the list goes on.

      MSR is not your average "burn grant money to stuff archives with papers" institution, the researchers are expected to deliver useful results.
    • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2The point of MSR is actually to hire great people so that other companies don't have them, sadly it does not seem to be to do anything with the output of said great people (unlike, say Google who has people actually produce public products).

      This project looks neat but I can't see a real product (or even a public trial product) coming from them anytime soon. All there is right now is a Java proof of concept (which is in itself kind of funny that it's not in .Net).
  • TMoB, on 10/12/2007, -18/+4I can't believe this app will work automatically. We'll see.
  • tweeto, on 10/12/2007, -54/+15I can tell you what the error messages will look like:

    "Your photo doesn't exist",
    "Make sure your photo is genuine, we can help you take genuine photos with our new WGA-photo tool"...

    Thanks but I'll stick with flicker.
    • ilyag, on 10/12/2007, -7/+25You're a moron.
    • cathode, on 10/12/2007, -11/+23flickr? it's like old ***** for egotistic photography wannabees. I have better things to do than to look at someone's photo of some internet cafe. at least this thing would have real interest value, be dynamic, and actually allow you to walk around an object.
  • alx359, on 10/12/2007, -14/+3Clever idea!
    Not very clear however how do they correctly index scale and context. Simply building 3D models from a bunch of photos wouldn't work IMO. I imagine each photo needs to get carefully catalogued (by hand) using some sort of a generic set of spatial/geographic criteria to find its correct place in the puzzle. This could overkill the whole idea momentum.
    • alx359, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Okay, I see got modded down, so obviously wasn't clear enough what I meant.
      My point was the extraction of features of a photo (signature) without some kind of extra context info of its sorrounding shouldn't be enough to assemble a scene in any non-trivial case I can think of.

      For example, I can take a shot of friends where at the background is a house. In London for example, houses tend to have a pretty traditional architecture, so if you don't include some extra information where that shot was made, such picture could "fit" in thousand places. That I call context.

      Now think of some desert sand landscape. Again, such landscape is so common that could fit somewhere else, but most importantly, it finally happened the shot was a close-up of my leg that may "seem" like a sand desert at this distance. I call this scale.

      At the moment, I can't imagine extracting the above information without some manual metadata profiling, which comes against the whole idea.
    • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Not to mention that in a desert sandscape the picture you took would be of a different landscape than someone who was there a month earlier or later.

      For easy to recognize landmarsks like famous buildings though, it could quickly assemble an impressive array of photos to use just from tags already in Flickr or the like.
  • j128, on 10/12/2007, -20/+4I had actually had the idea of doing this a few months ago. I guess great minds think alike (-:.
  • tinkafoo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Merge this with what Amazon had going with their Mturk/A9 Blockview HITs, and we could create a huge interactive 3D database of the location of everything under the sun.

    (Yeah I'm looking at you, Amazon. You really shot yourself in the foot when you dropped the A9 HITs from Mturk..)
    • karch, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1yeah, that's ... that's a good idea! *****, and plus it would take care of goatses and tubgirls. someone get on this, stat.
  • aaron.dunlap, on 10/12/2007, -12/+8that is freakin unreal.... way to go MS. now if only it was open source. :-P
    • chriskzoo, on 10/12/2007, -5/+24Why? It'll be so much more fun to watch Linux nuts (yes, I know Windows software can be open source too) complain that a MS product is not available to them.
    • macewan, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1is it that hard for you to understand that what we're really talking about it making information accessible to all?
    • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Why would Linux users complain? Currently the interactive demo is in Java, so they can see it just fine.
  • uzusan, on 10/12/2007, -4/+24Anyone else notice the bottles of Microsoft "Brain Wash" on the desks in the video?
  • axentrix, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11That's a totally awesome idea, but will a more large-scale version, like a whole city, work as intended?

    How cool would google-earth be with something like this?
    • wshphoto, on 10/12/2007, -11/+2Google Earth does have something similar, well sorta, 3-D buildings.

      Photosynth looks badass. I wonder if the software looks at Exif data as well...
  • ll350, on 10/12/2007, -17/+3Yeah that's totally cool, I just wish MS would put a little more effort into security. All I could think of when I watched it was, if you can do something as amazing as this, how come I still keep getting spyware on my computer? Why not amaze me with some awesomely secure OS code?
  • philbrewer, on 10/12/2007, -6/+4freakin sweet.
  • kob0724, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5Who's going to control that photo index?
  • Reno582, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5This would be more useful to websites like Flickr, very cool stuff
    • dooraque, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10You mean "this would be more useful THAN websites like Flickr"? :>
    • Reno582, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4but what is it? A program? an extension of .NET? if they could implement this into AJAX then that will be a whole new way to connect users through digital pictures
  • jals, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10I'll believe it when I use it. Great idea but come on, it'll never work in practice with real people's photos which don't look as perfect and tidy as the ones shown.
  • bdxphoenix, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Am I the only one who finds it odd that they use wikipedia on this page http://labs.live.com/photosynth/whatis/smartphotos.html instead of...say...encarta?

    Although I'm guessing they aren't going to produce a linux version (and thus, I cannot use it), that does look like a very cool technology if they can pull it off. From all the shots of it though, I imagine that they have only done one city and it is probably very slow (they probably use the magic of video to speed up the shots).

    Microsoft can come up with some good ideas, but will they be able to follow through on this or will it go the way of the WinFS?
  • challahc, on 10/12/2007, -10/+2not really a web app, how about building a browser that will work on any os, and complies with standards, that can run something like this.
  • scinortcele, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5God bless 'em if it works.

    The Newton was "Awesome!" as well before it came out.

    Smells like Fable to me.
  • jonesin, on 10/12/2007, -12/+1Holy ***** that looks cool. Seems kinda hard to believe that microsoft could be doing it, I'd expect something that awesome to come outta google or something
  • NewsBandit, on 10/12/2007, -7/+7As a random sidenote, just so everyone knows this isn't a thing Microsoft developed in-house. Its another bit of microsoft assimilation. Still, it looks friggin' insane, so good buy Mr. Softy.
  • biofusion, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8Man I love how people are still complaining, it's a prototype people. Yeah Microsoft made it, get over it. I like where this is heading, Live Labs has pushed some great stuff out there. Keep it up.
  • cerisaac, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Yes this looks cool, so +Digg. But, why does this just feel like another reason Vista is taking so long. Microsoft has so many things going that they all come out half ass-ed!
    • EtherGnat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2It's a rule of software development that at some point throwing more people at a project makes it take longer. Everybody gets bogged down in meetings, conflicts, communication, management--the smallest things start to take forever. If there's a problem with Vista it's too many people working on it.

      Microsoft is a huge company. I'm sure they can spare a few programmers.
  • bmoore622, on 10/12/2007, -12/+5due to come out in the year 2010... wait it was delayed until 2015... wait it was delayed AGAIN until 2020. I'll believe it when I see it...
  • syneo, on 10/12/2007, -12/+9Ok, I'm probably stupid. If so, educate me please. What exactly is so cool about this? What's it for? It doesn't look interesting even as a demo or a pure eye candy. This is not trolling, just pure curiosity. I'm just baffled by the loads of "this is cool!" comments. What's cool? I truely want to share your joy.
    • syneo, on 10/12/2007, -9/+6And just as I expected, discussion is unwanted here. How could I expect anyone on digg to answer legitimate questions or even help me see what I'm missing. No, you will rather mod me down. No, this is not a forum, let alone community.
    • dooraque, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5It's something that could be a revolution in photography. Btw, stop whining around, it's the internet.
    • syneo, on 10/12/2007, -9/+5> It's something that could be a revolution in photography.

      Yes, I read that on the site. But _how_ is this revolution? What kind of revolution?

      By the way, "this is the internet" is an empty and redundant statement.
    • hchaudh1, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3@syneo

      Forget it. This is Digg. Its full of script kiddies and copy paste hacks that will mod you down for disagreeing with them. Remember the whole PS3 vs Wii thing. Digg is the MySpace of social websites. If you want discussion, go to slashdot.

      Not that I don't enjoy visiting Digg, but this is not the forum for intelligent discussion.
    • mcottier, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3syneo:

      Probably just stupid? If you don't see the potential of this, then you my friend are more then stupid, you are a full blown mentally challenged person. How can you not think it is revolutionary for you to be able to walk through an entire city in 3D on your computer, exploring shops and more?

      And Digg is definitely a place for intelligent discussion hchaudh1, just to smart for you obviously.
  • shranko, on 10/12/2007, -2/+17Very cool tech. The guy who figures out how to integrate it with porn will be the next millionaire.
  • p0s3r, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Pretty nice. Microsoft Research has always done a lot of interesting work and it seems they're letting this live labs stuff flourish as well.
  • biometricks, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7I like how that one guys vision of the future of Photosynth is "taking a tour of a paticular handbag store in Paris"
    • EtherGnat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5It's not a purse, it's a european carryall!
  • FullHazard, on 10/12/2007, -15/+3Am I the only person who sees the privacy issue here? Under the auspices of this project, they get people to upload their vacation photos, creating a huge database of photographs (presumably with date and location metadata). All MS has to do is add in some code (and because they're closed source, it's easy to add malicious code without telling anyone) to run facial recognition on the 'Photosynth' system. I wouldn't want to wake up one morning and find a database of every photo i've ever been in floating around the net...
    • Double-Z, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13Don't upload your pictures to it then, simple.
  • mahoutie, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12Can't believe I'm actually digging a microsoft product!
    I need to go lie down now....
  • ArmchairAthlete, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I'm wondering how they deal with photos shot with various cameras at different times of the day ending up looking so different. Seems like it works with one camera taking shots of an area at one time of day.
  • Hirnhygien, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6This is awesome.
    But can it be that THIS doesn't come from APPLE? Macsters will have a deep crisis.
    • ConceptJunkie, on 10/12/2007, -6/+5Yeah, but at least Steve Jobs won't be throwing chairs if MS beats him to the punch on the next generation of photography software.

    • dooraque, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Oh he will, but not in public ;)
    • DelMonte, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1To be fair, and I'm a Mac/Apple fan, Steve Jobs wouldn't throw chairs, he would throw digital cameras ;)
  • daza, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Aweomse stuff. Very interesting presentation and I look forward to seeing what comes from it. Thanks for the article.
  • kampfy, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Video is even more awesome because the guy with the black hair sounds very, very similar to Christopher Walken.
  • gabeN, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5I think the e coolest aspect is the web-integration... If you have a spider that crawls the web strictly for images (or possibly images + contextual data like location and subject) and can cull those images into a centralized database, the "virtual world" created in a program like this will be perpetual, and continually expanding. You needn't even upload your pictures to this program, If they are on the web, they're in Photosynth!


    Bravo!
  • littlebit, on 10/12/2007, -6/+0Great! Hey.. Do we have any OS freaks here that are willing to improve and realise this idea? ;)
  • ajskhan, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Coca_Cola_Asks_Users_to_Provide_Site_s_Content
  • jaypee68, on 10/12/2007, -12/+8Wow, yet another useless piece of software. Anyone remember VRML?
    • dooraque, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Yeah, it's just like VRML, wise guy, except that social software thing and digital imaging. And you need no 3D scanner for using it, only a digicam everyone has nowadays. It will be a great success.
    • jaypee68, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Ahh yes, thank you for recognizing my vast depth of wisdom. A great suckcess maybe, nobody will use this and it'll pass like a fart in the wind. It'll be about as successful and useful as Paint and Wordpad in Windows XP, or hey maybe it'll even be as popular as Microsoft Bob and the talking paperclip MS Office were.
  • weighsaton, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2It's got my attention, one of the most exciting things i've heard for a long time, guessing i'll have to wait along time before it is realised. 'A powerful idea, indeed'
  • jameshighmore, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4Great idea but there are several problems.

    Firstly, places are dynamic. They change in terms of age, lighting, scenery... anything really. The trailer seems to suggest that uploading the photos is an automatic process, so the software must be very powerful to account for the factors I mentioned.

    Secondly, how in hell's name is this software going to work out the spatial information with only 2D pictures as references? They made it look so simple on the video but I'll be damned if any human would bother doing that.

    Finally, they mention that there could be hundreds of different photos of just one area. Let's say this area has a famous landmark, so it's safe to assume that the majority of people will be taking pictures of the landmark alone. Which of the hundreds of pictures of this landmark will be shown? Can we choose which one to see? How will it be regulated?

    I'm gonna be dreaming about how MS can pull this off tonight.
  • aleandro, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Looks pretty cool. Plus live lab is now collaborating with yahoo on the IM field, imagine if flickr was used as a database for this?
    • biofusion, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1It's possible considering their messenger programs are both able to talk to each other now...
  • Revolt25, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1its a cool idea, but would never work, to much work, and couldent got photos to work together like that, i couldent see it working unless most of the world starts taking billions of photos of just buildings... gl microsoft haha
  • Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Perhaps something like this is what google intends from the 'geotag this' function in the picasa beta?
    It does after all, ask you to locate on google earth whereabouts it is - and combined with the web albums they are also testing in beta, its not unreasonable to see how they could be combined in such a way
    • Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1alternatively they could be considering using it to augment the 3d buildings function in google earth, with textures and for adding buildings which arent already there.
      its all conjecture of course but not impossible to do
  • TarryTops, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Cool Idea. Too complex to personalize. Waste of time but hey MS has money to pay.
  • chrissg, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1i like this idea, its very origional. I hope that Microsoft makes there own little suite with these fun apps.
  • jdollah, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Where's all the comments saying that MS stole this from iGhay?
  • mtgood, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2photo walker?
    http://www.photowalker.net/
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