Microsoft’s Photosynth is undeniably gorgeous - it lets users “walk” through various locales by stitching together thousands of user-submitted photos to create a virtual 3D environment. Unfortunately, up until today this experience has only been available to Windows users.
Cue Panoramio, a Spanish photo site that Google acquired in May 2007. Panoramio has just launched a new “Look Around” feature that seems like a toned down (but still impressive) version of Photosynth. And because it’s in Flash, you’ll be able to try it out on your Mac.
The site has stitched together photos from areas with high image density (mostly landmarks and city squares) to create its version of walk-through albums. At launch users can choose from sites including the top of the Empire State Building, the Sydney Opera House, and the Taj Mahal.
Users can even create their own “Look Around” destinations by taking 10-20 photos of their favorite places. Panoramio’s system indexes new photos and searches for matches every two weeks.
For more information and available destinations, check out Frank Taylor’s blog and the video below.
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Great stuff. I’ll start to ‘look around’…
Nice to see a similar service to MS to become available to everyone.
In previous posts regarding Google’s competitors I talked about the lack of inspiration that Google has for a couple of years.
No innovation means less possibilities in developing big revenues, and Google needs big revenues. “Look Around” looks like a skinny Photosynth.
Required reading:
http://openphotovr.jottit.com/re_panoramio
>_>
Google desperately needs an actual research department or else they will soon become the largest copycats in the technology world.
YOUTUBE SUCKS!
Google sucks! They ripped off that russian guy :(((((
FYI, Photosynth is now integrated into Virtual Earth 3D via the “Bird’s Eye” view. It’s a much better user experience. You’ll probably see Virtual Earth go cross platform on the Mac when Silverlight 2.0 gets closer to release simply because Microsoft definately won’t use Flash for such a strategic platform.
That said, Kudos to Panoramia for a clean UI, it’s definately a good v1.0
#3, definitely a ripoff of your work at openphotovr.org, not even an acknowledgment!
“Photosynth-like”?
Um, more like Photosynth-like-like, meaning that the term “Photosynth-like” is quite a stretch.
But I’m glad to see more work in this space.
Kinda sad about openphotovr guys.
Not much due diligence in Google acquisition or what?
This might be old news, but I saw links to Panoramio pictures in Google Maps the other day…I wonder how far the integration into Maps is going to go. That could be an amazing complement to Street View or could help to complete missing areas of Street View.
I doubt Panoramio was acquired because of this Photosynth stuff, they were acquired before that.
Google is a juggernaut. That doesn’t mean all development will be done in-house. They have made lots of acquisitions and that has zero correlation to the “innovation” that they clearly are a part of to date. Equal to that is their willingness to disrupt markets.
MS is trying to excactly copy the Google’s ad platform without any changes (and they DID iterate quite a bit on Overature’s basic model).
I noticed that images not included in Google Maps are not replicated properly - need to click on a photo few times in a row to hit a sever where it sits. Nothing like this happens with images included in Google Maps.
I guess the appeal of the service will diminish greatly if they only keep what they deem fit. I’ve got really good images sitting there and if they are gone I’ll stop uploading altogether. It’s one of those “How to piss off a user…”.
I’m not sure if this is innovative or confusing. Maybe both? I get what they’re doing, but the user experience isn’t satisfying to me at all. I rather just click on the thumbnails on the right. I think there are better ways to approach the UI on this bad boy to get a “walk-through-like” experience.
Took me 30 seconds to sign up, attempt to upload an image, find out the maximum size image they support is only 5MB, and then forget completely about this website forever.
That is really neat but an automated process for “navigating” would be far simpler then picking one angle at a time.
Jon
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