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August 5, 2007

Microsoft Photosynth Covers Shuttle Endeavour Pre-Launch

Michael Arrington

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I’m a big fan of all the 3D imaging tools in development around the net. Microsoft’s Photosynth project is clearly the most ambitious - it takes thousands of photographs of a geographic area and constructs a 3D model that the viewer can “fly” around and view.

Tonight they are pushing a new 3D model - coverage of the Space Shuttle Endeavour on the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida before launch. If you are on a Windows machine only, you can view it here. Click and drag the mouse, zoom in and out, etc.

There are other interesting projects as well - see our coverage of Everyscape, Fotowoosh and VisualSize. See also Microsoft Street Side and Virtual Earth as well as similar efforts from Google, which should eventually incorporate a lot of this stuff into one big interactive virtual world.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Ameed Taylor

    August 5th, 2007 at 9:46 pm

    Hopefully Photosnyth will be ported over to Firefox and Safari

  2. Raul Lopez

    August 5th, 2007 at 9:55 pm

    It runs on Firefox. I just used it.

  3. Adam Sheppard

    August 5th, 2007 at 9:57 pm

    Hi Ameed, Actually we already offer support for Firefox. Photosynth is still in the technology preview stage but we’re eager for as many people as possible to see what the technology is capable of. You can get more details from our systems requirements page - http://labs.live.com/photosynth/sysreq.htm

    Hope you enjoy the new collections!
    Adam.

  4. Tim

    August 5th, 2007 at 9:59 pm

    Hmm, not quite as cool as I had expected.

    I also ran it on Firefox, but it is less fluid than I expected. It is more a collection of stills than a real 3D image.

    Still neat, and the pictures switch pretty quickly, which is nice.

  5. Andy

    August 5th, 2007 at 11:38 pm

    Yeah! More cross-platform support!

    Oh wait. “The Photosynth technology preview runs only on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista.” Never mind.

  6. Gabe

    August 6th, 2007 at 8:01 am

    I’m not a huge of Microsoft, but I am somewhat impressed with Photosynth. These long-term projects/propositions are what they are good at. They lack in the type of markets that react quickly.

  7. BeingParents

    August 6th, 2007 at 8:22 am

    It seems that MS is trying to do for
    Space what Google has done for maps.

    Great Idea. We will need those images when
    the day comes when we want to take a vacation to MARS.

  8. Harshal Vaidya

    August 6th, 2007 at 8:36 am

    Photosynth did not work on Firefox even after having a plugin for it.

  9. david8

    August 6th, 2007 at 9:03 am

    Photsynth has been covered several times on TechCrunch to date. It’s hard to get excited when the only thing available are demos using photos from the Microsoft folks.

    How about actually putting something online that the rest of us can use to synthesize our own photos? It seems pointless to me to keep posting about photosynth until they have provided something different than the LAST TIME Techcrunch posted about them. The Endeavor stuff doesn’t count IMHO.

    How about a moratorium on photosynth posts…until they actually have a meaningful release for the general public. All these wet kisses that TechCrunch is blowing towards Microsoft are getting tiresome.

  10. Ben

    August 6th, 2007 at 10:31 am

    it’s so awesome how it only runs on Windows….so awesome….

  11. Andrew Pass

    August 6th, 2007 at 11:49 am

    What influence would one big virtual world have on the real world? I’m just wondering.

    Check out my living textbook: http://www.Living-Textbook.html

  12. Hornswaggled

    August 6th, 2007 at 12:12 pm

    I played around with it using Firefox, plugin works fine for me. It was interesting to see and it does have that cool factor, I haven’t seen anything else like it.

    I could see the real estate market trying to use this to cover houses at every angle. I hate most of the non interactive slide shows in their current form.

  13. Rex

    August 6th, 2007 at 1:49 pm

    MSNBC.com is a sponsor too. Here’s our launching pad into it:

    http://spaceworld.msnbc.com

  14. Jorge

    August 6th, 2007 at 3:38 pm

    @David8:

    It’s a technology PREVIEW. It is not a product (yet).

  15. Danny

    August 6th, 2007 at 6:05 pm

    >How about a moratorium on photosynth posts…

    How about one on people constantly taking the time to tell TechCrunch that they aren’t interested in the post they are commenting on? That’d be beautiful.

  16. 宇宙访客

    August 11th, 2007 at 6:45 pm

    IT’S COOL techology！

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