Photosynth, Microsoft’s impressive photo viewing project that stiches together images to create pseudo-3D worlds, got a major upgrade last week. The app has ditched Direct 3D (which only works on Windows) in favor of Silverlight, Microsoft’s cross-platform viewer, which means that Photosynth is now Mac friendly. So if you’re on a Mac and have only been able to look longingly at our coverage of the app over the last two years, here’s your chance.
Mac and Linux users have been able to take advantage of an experimental Silverlight Photosynth viewer since December, but the viewer has been missing a few key features until now, and Mac users haven’t been able to really participate in the Photosynth community. Now all Photosynth embeds will be in Silverlight by default. Also included with the update is a new ‘highlights’ feature, which makes it easier to find important landmarks and impressive photos in the Synths you’re exploring (previously you had to wander around aimlessly to find the best shots).
The Photosynth blog notes that the switch to Silverlight comes with some sacrificies – namely, users may see slower frame rates and ‘delayed point cloud density’, but the team is working to improve on these issues and the benefits afforded by Silverlight outweight the setbacks.
Photosynth hasn’t exactly hit the mainstream yet, but it’s starting to get more attention. Earlier this year CNN featured a Synth called ‘The Moment‘ that captured President Obama’s inauguration (it’s really a must-see if you didn’t get around to it in January). Also worth checking out is the unofficial Photosynth viewer iPhone app, which came out last month.
It’s nice to see that the team is still going strong, despite Microsoft’s decision to dissolve Live Labs (of which Photosynth was a part of) and distribute its projects to other product groups. Update: Live Labs isn’t shutting down, according to a post on its site, though some of its personnel have gone on to join other products.
We still can’t CREATE synths though…
Photosynth is an ok toy, but it’s a toy that got old for me quick. With no way to transfer it to a printable IRL version (or maybe DVD for the more intense 360 ones) it will never be anything more than a toy that gets old after a couple times playing with it.
Darius Monsef is a fantastic human being
He’s fantastic yes. But is he really human?
As far as I know I’m human… there are probably at least a few people who would argue the fantastic bit.
Live Labs hasn’t been dissolved:
“Contrary to recent whispers and tweets, we are not shutting down, disbanding, dismantling, or anything of the sort. In the coming weeks and months we’ll bring you updated developer tools, new ways to use Seadragon, and much more”
(http://livelabs...-for-live-labs/)
Thanks. Updated the post.
I read this blog title quickly and headed over to the site to download, what I thought would be the Mac-version of the synth creator, only to find out that it was a upgrade of the Silverlight client.
How disappointing.
I wanna synth some photos on my Mac!
PS. I also wanna make synths without making them public instantly, possible yet?
Whole idea was to make them public
You can set synths to be unlisted now. So if you want to refine one before making it public, or have something personal to share only with your family you can do that.
Thanks, that’s great news they can be private. I mainly want to experiment a lot before I publish them. Would be cool with a Mac app or some API so we could program against it our selfs.
Imagine running it against Google Simular Image search, that would be interesting synths!
Microsoft is also offering its SharePoint Designer 2007 software for free; what a fun day at Microsoft!
http://3007hq.b...t-designer.html
Mac publish a very good feature and I am appreciated this feature
This is a great example of how to use the technology
http://photonbe...pyramid-of-giza
as you can see you can explore photos of exterior sites like never before
photosynth is cool, I tried creating one yesterday and it didnt take me more than a couple of mins. I think its a great tool for realtors.
Photosynth is certainly a cool tool that shows a lot of promise. My classmates and I at Rutgers University have used Photosynth to capture large portions of our campus. If you’re interested you can see our results on our website: http://whereru.rutgers.edu/