Photosynth Blog

"You know my methods, Watson"

synthy — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:34:00 GMT

Dr. Watson didn't have access to Photosynth as a forensic tool in his day, but the makers of the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie (opens Christmas Day) certainly do.

They've created a fascinating multi-episode game to promote the movie. It features a new Photosynth every week until the movie opens. Each of them were shot on set, and you need to explore them very carefully indeed to solve the mystery. Go to http://221b.sh/ to play the game.

Here's a teaser to get you in the mood to explore the dark underbelly of 1890s London via Photosynth.

Elementary? I think not.

Memories of the Berlin Wall

synthy — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:02:00 GMT

Contributed by Gerold Hübner, whom I met when I was photographing this section of the wall in the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, Washington.

What does it mean to me as a German citizen standing right next to a real piece of the Berlin Wall here in the United States? Spontaneously there are mixed feelings. I was fortunate having had the chance to grow up in west Germany. So the Wall did not have as much impact on my life as it would have had if I lived in the former east Germany or east Berlin.

I had the freedom to travel anywhere where I wanted even though my limited revenues prevented me from going everywhere, unfortunately. But I cannot complain: I wanted to be a foreign exchange student in the US. And I really ended up as one in Mesa, Arizona, where graduated from high school in 1978.

Standing here next to the Wall it reminds me that my fellow citizens from east Germany back then have not had this privilege of freedom. It reminds me that the Wall was an unnatural barrier that prevented me, my sister and my brother from getting to know our uncles and cousins who lived behind the curtain. I remember my mother sending them packages with stuff that typically was not readily available in east Germany, e. g. good coffee, candy or modern clothes. I met my uncle only once, when he was allowed to travel to my grandmother’s funeral – without his wife and kids, who had to stay in east Germany to make sure he returned.

Back then and even shortly until the Wall came down it was very hard to believe that Germany would be re-united again some time. When it happened it took a while to realize this is for real. It felt good though. The east German Government kept its citizens like prisoners in our own country. A state like that does not deserve to exist. The day the Wall fell was a very happy day for me and everybody I know. There was some uncertainty during the first weeks after the Wall come open about how the other western countries would react to unified and potentially stronger Germany in the center of Europe. However, the was overwhelmingly large support for the German re-unification from all over that made me quite optimistic very soon.

The Wall is a piece of German history. One we would have liked to miss! It feels good and right that it is gone now. And when you are in Berlin looking for rests of the Wall you’ll have a very hard time finding some. It’s easier here in Redmond!

Welcoming Windows 7 in Wet, Windy, New Zealand

synthy — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:29:00 GMT

Today, October 22nd, is Windows 7 Launch day. And New Zealand, being just west of the International Date Line, was the first country to kick off the festivities.

The NZ Microsoft team have made interesting use of Photosynth before, and this time they've made two great synth of their colorful (or should I say colourful) events. Here's a video of the two synths they made, and below it is the Aukland synth for your enjoyment.

From a technical point of view, it's quite suprising how well Photosynth did with the tight shots of the sea of umbrellas. The umbrellas are fairly featureless, and many of them would have moved a little between successive shots. Nonetheless, Photosynth found enough in common that it was just able to reconstruct the scene. The strange transitions between many of the highligts comes from this very fragile connectivity.

Extra credit to those who come from non-Rubgy-playing countries and know who Richie McCaw is, and why he appeared at the event.

A New Angle on Photosynth

synthy — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:13:00 GMT

Today the Photostynth team has released a major new feature and a slew of small improvements.

New Feature: Overhead View

Have you ever wanted to look down on Mt Rushmore from directly above the Presidents? What about seeing the exact layout of Stonehenge from above? If you’ve used Photosynth you know that it automatically calculates a “cloud” of 3D points representing the features matched between photos. Our new overhead view lets you turn the photos off, and puts your point of view immediately above the scene. Here’s what I’m talking about:

Overhead view of RHaddlesey’s synth of Stonehenge.

But it gets better. Overhead view is not just for checking out the geometry of your scene, it’s also a quick way to navigate to other parts of it. The screenshot below shows the mouse hovering over a region, and one of the photos covering that region is shown as a thumbnail. Click your mouse, and you get a great transition into the 3D experience starting with that photo. Pretty cool, eh?

Detail from Charlpe’s synth of Mesa Verde

Static screenshots don’t really do Photosynth overhead view justice. Here’s a short video we made to show the feature in action.

Other Improvements

Not as flashy, but just as important, is the work we've done behind the scenes. Here are the highlights:

· An all-new, Silverlight-3 based viewer. It's noticably smoother and makes fewer network requests, so performance is better.

· The “View” button on the synther now automatically logs you in to the Web site and takes you directly into the editor so that you can complete title/description, and give your synth highlights and a geotag.

· Geotagging is now easier and you can even scale and rotate your synth in the map in a process we call “geoalignment”

· Multiword search no longer sucks. That’s harsh, but if you’ve ever tried to find a synth of “Green Lake” or “Smith Rock”, you would have been as frustrated as we were. It’s now much better.

Hope you enjoy this new work. Tells us what you think by leaving a comment below, or on our forum.

Good synthing,

David Gedye and the Photosynth Team.

Picture the Impossible

synthy — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:23:00 GMT

Less than two weeks ago, an alternate reality game created by the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle newspaper called " Picture the Impossible" began. Intended to engage members of the community in an exploration of Rochester, different games and activities were designed for the competition.

One of the challenges in the game was to create the best Photosynth of one of the 'Horses on Parade' sculptures in Rochester, NY. The competition is done and the results are in! They had nearly 150 entries in total.

I want to take the opportunity to thank and congratulate the participants and winners of the "Picture the Impossible Photosynth Horses' challenge.

Here are the winners' synths:

Tazwalker:

klesko86:

Poinky:

igator210:

Thanks to Bing for sponsoring the technical development for the games, and Elizabeth Lawley for promoting the use of Photosynth within them.

-Jonathan

Update to the Photosynth Terms of Use

synthy — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:10:00 GMT

Last week we released a minor update to our site that included a change to our Terms of Use. The change is that the following sentence was added to section 6:

Microsoft may use and display your materials posted on public areas of the service in Windows Live, Bing, MSN, or in any future online services.

What this means is that in the future we may promote Photosynth, and your public synths in particular, by embedding them in other online services from Microsoft. If this sounds a bit mysterious, it’s all about bringing the amazing power of Photosynth to capture places or objects to a wider audience than just the visitors of our site.

Important note: This only affects your public synths. People will never find your unlisted synths on the Photosynth site, or on any other Microsoft site. So, if you are not comfortable having your synths used in this way, you can always make them unlisted.

Yours truly,

David Gedye

Photosynth Group Program Manager

Microsoft.

Getting Your Synth Featured on the Homepage

synthy — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:15:00 GMT

We here on the Photosynth team have received a few queries on how we select synths to feature on the homepage. The following should provide some broad guidelines and advice:

Subject

Chances are that a synth of your living room will never make it to the homepage. We try and select synths that will be of interest to all our users. Landmarks, scenic vistas, still life, and the unique, weird, surprising or strange all have a better chance of making it onto the homepage.

Conditions

Just like taking a single photograph, the conditions under which you take the photos comprising the synth matter. Let's say we want to feature a synth of the Eifel Tower and we find two synths that are comparable in every way except that one was taken on a gray day in very flat light, and the other in the magic hour (just after sunrise/just before sunset) with brilliant light. The one taken in the great lighting conditions will be the one to make it on the homepage.

Synthyness

I'm using the term synthyness here not just to describe the % you see next to the synth on its card but rather how well the synth holds together as a whole. Things to consider:

Composition/Completeness of scene: Is your synth of the Statue of Liberty missing the torch? Is there a blank space in the middle of a panorama? This is the type of thing that will work against you if many people have shot the same scene.
% Synthyness - This by no means has to be 100%, but it would have to be a pretty special synth to make it to the homepage if the percentage is under 75%. Consider resynthing without any photos that didn't synth.
Number of photos: There need to be enough to make the synth interesting, this could be 10 or a few hundred. Be aware that having a huge number of photos will make it less likely that you're chosen as the hero synth (the one actually playing on the homepage) due to the longer load times these larger synths necessitate. Your chances of making the featured synths are unaffected though.
Detail shots: Are there detail shots in your synth? We love to be able to drill into details. This won't make or break you but could be a deciding factor in our choosing one synth over another.

Individual Photos

The quality of the photos that make up the synth matter as well. They should be properly exposed, color balanced and have a resolution of at least 3MP. Having at least a few well composed shots that would stand well as individual photos within the synth helps as well, especially if these shots are used as the thumbnail/starting image/highlights.

Highlights

Highlights are those little thumbnails you see down the right hand side of some synths. They make a synth more navigable and allow you to guide your viewers to the most interesting points in it. Highlights with good titles and captions are especially likely to get us excited about a synth.

Metadata

Have you added metadata to your synth? Again, if we're considering two similar synths for the homepage the one with the better metadata has an advantage. Having this data also greatly increases our ability to find your synth. If we're looking for a synth of the Empire State Building you may have a great one, but if it's titled as "test" or "ny" has no tags, description, or geotag we'll never find it to even consider it. Specifically make sure you've added the following:

Title: is it appropriate and meaningful?
Description: Where? When? What? Almost like writing a book report.
Geotag: This will help us find it on the map if we're looking for synths of a specific locaiton.
Tags: helps with searching

Other thoughts

Your synth has to be noticed for it to be considered. Sometimes we'll be searching for specific things for a themed homepage (see the metadata section above for pointers on increasing your chances here), but other times we just pick synths we think are cool. This means we have to see your synth in the first place. This most often happens when it shows up in the recently synthed list on the explore page. Another way to help a synth get noticed is to start a thread about it in the forums.

Oh, and we also accept photo gear as bribes :-)

Tony Ernst

Test Lead

Photosynth Turns One Year Old

synthy — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:40:00 GMT

One year ago today Photosynth.net opened its doors. We'd had a technology preview out for more than a year, but on August 20th 2008, people around the world could try it themselves for the first time. And did they ever!

Propelled by massive blog interest and articles in all the national papers our upload capacity was quickly overwhelmed, and we spent most of the first day offline. Not an auspicious start! But, we handled the crisis pretty well... we worked through the day provisioning extra hardware and fixing a key choke point, and by 6:00pm Pacific we were solidly back on line. I'm happy to say that we haven't had any major outages since that first day, and because we communicated openly about the situation, we got some bouquets as well as the criticism we expected.

Millions of Photos, Billions of FLOPs
Here are the key stats from Photosynth's first year. They're accurate to within a few percent, with the exception of the FLOPs number which is only accurate to an order of magnitude.

422,508	synths created
15,880,950	photos synthed and uploaded
15,541,978,306	3D points in all point clouds combined (15 billion)
26,445,915,945,733,700	number of floating point operations performed in all computations (26 quadrillion)
8,979,357,357	peak simultaneous FLOPs of all computations (8.9 GigaFLOPs)
472,000	peak synths viewed per day

Highlights of the Year
Without a doubt, the highlight of the Photosynth's first year was the Presidential Inauguration on January 20th. Both CNN and MSNBC featured synths of the moment at which the President took the oath of office, and CNN gave Photosynth 20 minutes of airtime over a five day period. These were tricky synths to shoot and assemble. MSNBC used just a few professional photographers, while CNN augmented its professionals with its "iReports" community, and received more than 9,000 submissions from people who were at the inauguration, or watched it at home.

Along with PR successes like this, the technology itself has moved ahead significantly during the year. In January we released our Silverlight viewer so that for the first time people on the Macintosh platform could view synths. In April we made a big improvement to navigation by adding "highlights" and "path planning" so that the synth creator could guide their viewers through the 3D world. And in May we announced our commercial licensing terms -- we now have more than 200 different Web sites that are regularly embedding synths.

What's Next?
We've been heads-down since May working on a couple of different initiatives. The first is a Silverlight 3-based viewer that we'll be releasing in the fall. When it ships you should see smoother transitions, less network chatter, and a whole new "angle" on viewing synths. For now I'll have to leave it up to you to imagine what that might mean :-)

The second initiative is great integration with Bing Maps. Our commercial Photosynth licensing announcement in May confirmed what was rumored before -- that Photosynth had graduated out of Live Labs to become part of Virtual Earth. For individuals and businesses, synths are becoming an important way to document the places they care about. Those places all live on a map, and what our customers have been asking for is to make this connection both obvious and magical. We're working on it!

Beyond these two initiatives, we have a laundry list of great feature ideas that our community has been asking for. At the very top of this list is the challenge of making synth viewing a more understandable, easier to use, experience. This has always been the toughest problem for a product like Photosynth which deals with totally unstructured photography. It's tough, but it's the problem that we need to solve in order to turn Photosynth into a useful tecnhology for the broad mass of Internet users.

Farhad Manjoo from Slate said that Photosynth was "the best thing to happen to photography since the digital camera" We think he's right, but our modest user numbers suggest that we're not quite there yet. If, through a combination of better rendering, better navigation, and better tools for the creators, Photosynth can reliably deliver truly immersive experiences, we'll have truly earned this title. It's an exciting prospect.

Happy Birthday to Us
In honor of Photosynth's first birthday we baked a cake. To make sure it synthed well, we put sprinkles and highly textured frosting on it, then sat the whole Photosynth team behind it as we spun it around. The result is quite tasty!

Good synthing,

David Gedye
Photosynth Group Program Manager

Homepage Update 8/4/2009

synthy — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 02:58:00 GMT

Greetings and Salutations, I'm Tony Ernst the Test Lead for Photosynth. Lucky me to be the first person other than Darius to pick a synth for the homepage. Now there are a lot of great synths of cities,art and various and sundry knick-knacks out there, and some of them I quite enjoy, but what really gets me excited is the natural world. For today's homepage update I obviously chose some beautiful synths from nature, but there is another theme as well. Any guesses as to what it may be?

I've been working on putting together a list of bugs that are annoying, yet relatively easy to fix. Please vent about what's bugging you (ha ha) about the site in the bugs forum and who knows it may just influence me to include your pet problem in the list. And before anyone asks, no, adding images to an existing synth does NOT qualify as a "relatively easy to fix".

Tony Ernst

Goodbye To Darius, Hello To Greg, And Changes To How Homepage Synths Are Selected

synthy — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 02:52:00 GMT

Darius Monsef, who has been our point man for the Photosynth community since he joined the team 10 months ago, has decided to return to his start up roots. While Darius had an impact throughout our website, personally, his mission to "get rid of the green" and change the sites color scheme to the current the current shades of gray will be the action I am eternally grateful to Darius for. Thanks Darius, you will be missed.

At the same time we say good bye to Darius we'd like everyone to say hi to Greg Pascale. You may know Greg as the guy who created the iSynth App for the iPhone (check it out here). A former intern, Greg has finished up school and joined us full time. It's always nice to have a new dev around to fix the old bugs that no one else wants to touch. Isn't he lucky?

One of Darius's duties was to select the synths we feature on the homepage - which usually change twice a week. Rather than assign this task to one person, we're going to try something new and spread the responsibility across the whole team. Each week, you'll have one of our crack engineering team selecting some of their favorite synths for the homepage and if they feel like sharing, writing a quick blog entry.

We're not sure how this will work, but it's worth a shot.

Which leads us to the next blog post...

Tony Ernst

Photosynth Gets a Whole New Look and a Few Improvements

synthy — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 04:05:00 GMT

Along with a lot of little bug fixes, tweaks and general improvements we launched some pretty major visual updates to the website to help improve your experience with us. Also, with the revamp of the site design we did some work to improve our site search to help you find the great synths you’re looking for.

Site Design Update

Our green Photosynth theme has been with our team since the beginning and we didn’t want to lose it completely, but we did realize that as our pages got longer with more useful community content we needed to improve the design to help make that content easier to read. The darker background and colors also help the great photos in your synths shine the most on the page. Have a look around the site with the new design and let us know your thoughts.

Comments & Geotags on Tradecards

We added the comment count and geotag icon to tradecards across the site to help you see what synths have been located on the map and what synths are being actively discussed... or where you can be the first to leave a comment.

New Homepage with Fresh Content

Our new homepage has a full viewer on it so visitors can directly explore one of our latest favorite synths. Along with showcasing this one spectacular synth in the viewer we’re also highlighting 6 other great synths. We’ll be updating these regularly, so check back often to see what’s new and if one of your synths has been featured.

Improved Search

We improved the search on our site to allow you to sort the results not just by the best keyword match, but also by synth quality, popularity, date and author. Give the new search a try!

Initial Synth Visibility Setting

The point cloud gets a lot of love, but sometimes we know you might not want it to show by default when your synth loads... and sometimes that’s all you want to show! We’ve added a setting to the Synth Editing panel to allow you to set the initial visibility to include the images & points, images only or points only. You can get to this setting by logging in and viewing any of your own synths. There is a Edit Synth & Highlights button that will take you to the edit page when clicked.

Happy Synthing!

DariusMonsef

Photosynth Now Commercially Available with Microsoft Virtual Earth Integration

synthy — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:35:58 GMT

We joined the Virtual Earth team a couple months ago and we’re excited to release the first result of our joint efforts. Commercial partners can now use the Virtual Earth platform to take advantage of the immersive 3D photo experiences Photosynth can create and share. You can learn more about Virtual Earth and our new commercial offering at the Virtual Earth product site.

We just posted the news about this, but we’ve already begun to hear some great feedback: TechCrunch thinks this is Where Awesomeness Meets and ReadWriteWeb notes that Photosynth Goes to Work.

NASA’s International Space Station Photosynths

View all the Space Station synths here.

VisitBrighton’s Royal Pavillion Photosynth

View the synth here.

Microsoft Photosynth Integration into Virtual Earth

Watch a video with some more information about the integration.

If you’re interested in a Photosynth commercial license, you can obtain one by contacting the Microsoft Virtual Earth Sales Team at maplic@microsoft.com.

P.S. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean we’re taking away the free Photosynth that so many of you love to use. You can still continue to use Photosynth for your personal projects. Our new commercial option will allow us to partner with big brands and to help more people discover how great a Photosynth experience can be.

-DariusMonsef

New Features: “Highlights” & Cross-Platform Viewer

synthy — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 01:13:00 GMT

We’re really excited about this update to Photosynth. We’ve added a major new feature to our viewing experience and have improved the viewer to reach even more people. With our new highlights feature you can point out the “can’t miss” areas of your synths and the new Silverlight viewer will allow you to share your synths with people on more operating systems.

Silverlight-based Cross-Platform Viewer

Our goal has always been to share the Photosynth experience with as many people as possible, but our Direct 3D viewer hasn’t been friendly to our Mac friends. We’ve been working on our Silverlight experimental viewer and I’m excited to say we’re promoting it to be the main viewer for Photosynth. This will allow PC and Mac users to not only view synths but join in the rest of the Photosynth community by leaving comments, marking favorite synths and getting to know their fellow synthers.

Our embedding code has also been moved over to Silverlight so now you can embed your synths around the web and reach even more viewers with your fantastic creations.

Updated Viewer Controls

We’ve updated the viewer controls in the Silverlight viewer to be more useful when exploring synths. Based on your feedback and support we’ve consolidated all the navigation buttons in the center bottom of the viewer. No more hunting around with your mouse to all the corners of the viewer to get around.

Synth Highlights

Photosynth does an awesome job taking lots of flat photos and stitching them into immersive 3D experiences… but sometimes it can be hard to find all the best places hidden around a synth. With our new highlights feature you not only can find some of the best spots in a synth… you can take a smooth journey through the synth from highlight to highlight.

A Couple Great Highlight Rich Examples… (More Coming too!)

Nellie Inglerock - Masonic Cemetery by dariusmonsef

Art Gallery of New South Wales by David

Martello Tower: Inside & Out by lostinthetriangle

How to Add Highlights to Your Synths

-Click Edit Synth and Highlights in the right info area for your synth. You’ll need to be logged in.

-Find A Great Photo (Optional: Give it a Title & Caption) - Click Add Highlight

-Find Another Great Photo… repeat.

-Click Save

Now you can explore your synth with the newly added highlights.

One Step Back. Two Leaps Forward.

Moving to the Silverlight viewer might look like a step back in performance because of the lower frame rate and delayed point cloud density… but this move has allowed us to take two leaps forward. We’re now able to allow Mac users to fully participate on our website and we can build editing and highlights features right into the viewer code. We haven’t written off performance for these two new benefits. Our team is working hard on improving performance so that the Silverlight viewer can not only be more feature rich than the D3D viewer but be equally high performance if not better.

If you’re looking for the old D3D viewer you can still get to it from the “View Synth in Direct3D Viewer” link in the bottom left of the viewer area on any synth page.

Where’d My Halos Go?

Probably the saddest thing we’re missing in the Silverlight viewer is the Halos or Donuts that we used to show where there was an object that can be rotated around. This feature is still there, it just has a different visual icon. Again, this is something we know some of you will miss and we’ll find a way to keep making the Silverlight viewer better and more donut-y.

You’ll also probably notice a new Unlisted feature. This lets you upload a synth without making it public. This will be great for fine tuning your synths before sharing the final version with the public. This unlisted option comes along with some commercial features for bigger brands to start using Photosynth, but I’ll cover those details in more depth in a future post.

Now go add some great highlights and share them with your friends!

A User Created Photosynth Primer: Jump In!

synthy — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:38:00 GMT

This is a guest post by swami_worldtraveler, a fairly new user who has really jumped in and started producing some great work and finding interesting ways of sharing his new passion with others. We’re very excited to see people like him take such an interest in Photosynth (and we’re jealous of his profession… he lists it as “world traveler”).
-View the original article here.

Photosynth Primer

I decided to put together some visuals and text to entice you into my latest foto/3D obsession....

Here are a series of screen-grabs. They were chosen to be visual compelling, and to cover a broad range of features, user controls, and user interface particulars. Highlighted ruins include the Temple of the Inscriptions, a grand view of the site, and the skull from the Temple of the Skull. Totally new to most, and hopefully exciting, is the 3D "point cloud" model resulting from the synth. Exactly what this is will be come clear below.

Take a quick visual scan below, then jump right in, if you like!

Go here: Mayan Ruins of Palenque (take 3's the charm!?)" - and yes, it was the charm :)
http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=0c71b1c4-8113-4bc4-bf4d-71ec4d9c6749

For those interested in getting the full experience (or who just get into this stuff), your tour begins now :) ...
(Or for a quicker introduction, consider looking at the "Quick Guide" in my travel blog)

This is the basic, COMPLETE INTERFACE running in the Firefox web browser. You can see multiple planes (fotos) making up the panorama. Most of the fotos are concentrated around the temple in the center. And notice the interface icons around the border. Click 'em and see what happens! Hold the mouse cursor over one to get a description.

In FULL-SCREEN mode, here's a different angle of the temple. This is certainly the preferred viewing mode.

BAM! 3D 'POINT CLOUD' MODEL! The program has used sophisticated robot vision algorithms and relative spatial analysis to create a 3D facsimile of the scene! Clicking and dragging the donut in the middle reveals the various viewpoints shot. Use the 'p' key to enter this mode. Click 'p' multiple times to cycle thru.
Note: this donut only appears under certain conditions.

This is another view of the temple point cloud, but no foto was taken from this exact angle! By doing a Ctrl+click-n-drag on the donut you can orbit anywhere and get a better sense of the 3D environment. More fotos of a given area lead to more detail (i.e. points). The sparse points to the upper-right of the temple represent the trees on the ridge.

This is a "grand" view taken from the Group of the Crosses. This is the first screen you see for this particular synth. The Temple of the Inscriptions can be seen center-left, just behind some trees, and The Palace is just to its right. To the fore-left is the Temple of the Sun.

And here's the grand view seen full-screen.

This is the GRID VIEW. It's a simple layout of all the fotos in the synth. They're grouped into 'clumps.' These fotos are all connected in a 3D space. They all have objects in common with at least one or more other fotos. Click the 'm' key to move from clump to clump. This works in Grid View and 3D view. Fewer clumps mean more connectedness and a greater "% synthy" scene. But "100% synthy" does not necessarily mean better. In this scene I've included maps, and hieroglyphs which aren't meant to connect, but add to the experience.

Here's the GRID VIEW in FULL-SCREEN mode. More real estate; easier to navigate!:)

This is a CLOSE-UP of a foto in GRID VIEW. Single-click to select and zoom to. Use '+' and '-' to zoom in and out. You can also click-n-drag. And quite useful is to use SPACEBAR/Shift+SPACEBAR to move from foto to foto. This works in 3D view, too. In fact, this is a good way to ensure you see all there is to see. You can also click the PLAY icon.

By double-clicking on the foto in grid view you go to 3D view, centered on that foto. Can you find this skull!?

OK. That's it. Have fun :)

Photosynth on the iPhone: iSynth App

synthy — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 01:25:00 GMT

Greg Pascale, who was an intern here at Photosynth last summer recently released an app he’s been working that let’s you experience synths on your iPhone. He was able to take advantage of the good 3D support on the iPhone to allow you to not just browse around a synth's image collection… but to see the point cloud and even the projections of where the cameras were when they took the photos. Get iSynth here or search for it in the iPhone app store.

Here are some screenshots from my “Head of Greg” synth: (Photos / Point Cloud / Camera Projection)

Sarah Perez wrote a post about the new iSynth app and gave a very nice introduction…

“One of the best products so far to emerge from Microsoft’s Live Labs has got to be Photosynth, an amazing tool that lets you transform your photos into three-dimensional worlds you can then virtually explore. In the past, we’ve seen Photosynths integrated with Live Maps, turned into slideshows, geotagged, changed into Point Clouds, and even used to document historical events like President Obama’s inauguration. Now you can add one more to that list: Photosynth has come to the iPhone.”

-Read the full post on her Channel 10 blog.

So far Greg’s app has been well received:

TechCrunch “iSynth Brings Microsoft’s Powerful 3D Photo Viewer Photosynth To The iPhone”

ArsTechnica “If you're into photography, or just like cool applications, it's probably worth a look.”

@gregdowning “Orbit mode on iSynth is cool! You can see the frustrum of all the cameras. tap the "i" in upper right to get menu then touch "orbit" to spin”

@frogtosser “Checking out isynth for the iPhone/touch. Pretty awesome.”

-iSynth on twitter…

Info from Greg’s website:

Quick Menu Buttons

Tip: While using iSynth, for a quick description of what a button does, simply hold it down for a moment and a description will appear (unless you've turned off the "Description Labels" option in the settings menu). If you hold any button for longer than a moment, it will not press when you release it.

	Show/hide the full menu
	Quit the current synth and go back to the selection screen
	Jump to the next 3D group of connected photos
	Enter slideshow mode
	Enter orbit mode
	Exit orbit mode
	Toggle point cloud-only view (show/hide photos)
	Go to the settings menu
	Rotate the screen
	Show/hide cameras (in arc ball mode)
	Go to the about/help screen

Quick Controls

Normal Mode:

- Tap on any arrow to move to a different photo.
- Drag one finger to reveal other photos that can be visited. Lift your finger to jump to the highlighted photo.
- To rotate first-person-shooter style, drag one finger in the direction you wish to rotate while holding another finger stationary anywhere on the screen
- Use the standard spread/pinch gestures to zoom in and out

Orbit Mode:

- To "orbit" around the synth, simply drag one finger in the direction you wish to rotate.
- To move forwards or backwards, use the spread/pinch gestures.
- To strafe left, right, up or down, drag two fingers in the same direction.
- To leave orbit mode, tap the button in the upper left corner with the red X. This will take you back to normal mode to the image you came from.
- Double tap a camera to jump to the photo taken by that camera (and return to normal mode).

Slideshow Mode:

Not much needs to be said about slideshow mode; the controls are fairly self explanatory. To leave slideshow mode and go back to normal mode, press the stop button.

Synth well, dariusmonsef