Must See! Microsoft's Photosynth Makes Photos a 3D Experience
Newly live Web site provides users with 20GB of free storage, making it easy to create and share amazing 3D walkthroughs of your favorite places.
Danny Allen, PC World
Creating Your Own Synth
Microsoft provides an excellent primer on the best way to shoot photos for use in Photosynth. The basics: Capture JPEG images only (unlimited size); try and overlap shots by about 50 percent; start with a wide panoramic shot before moving in for greater detail; ensure that all photos are oriented correctly; and limit the angles between photos. The more suitable your shots are, the more coordinates Photosynth will have to build a reconstruction with (3D designers will be familiar with this "point cloud" concept). The more points there are, the more "synthy" your collection will be.
A quick note on copyright: Since all synths are public for the moment, it's good to see that you're able to fully--or partially--restrict the reuse of your photos through a full spectrum of Creative Commons license options.
Uploading a simple 10-photo synth takes a matter of minutes. I went a little more extreme and uploaded a 156-photo test shot at San Francisco's well-known Red's Java House by the bay. My collection (214MB of 2048-by-1536-resolution shots) took about 75 minutes to upload and was immediately available as a synth. As an indication of just how far Photosynth has come, the demo shown at the 2007 TED Conference--which took multiple machines two weeks to calculate--can now be created in an hour, on a single laptop.
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