Photosynthyness

A while back, a TED video was floating around that demoed a Microsoft Labs project entitled Photosynth.  It was the coolest thing I had seen in a while.  Photosynth stitched together photos taken of an object, say Notre Dame Cathedral, so you could explore and dive into the image with incredible detail.

At the time of the talk, Photosynth was a labs project, not released for the public to play with.  That changed in October 2008, when anyone could make their own “synth”.

Photosynth came back on my radar recently because Microsoft is starting to incorporate synths into their mapping product Virtual Earth.

Well, what does that mean for the A/E/C industry?  Visualization is a useful tool.  Imagine buildings being documented with pictures, that you can explore in an amazing amount of detail.  A yearly synth could be made to show changes in condition over time.  I see annotating the synths with loads of metadata.  For instance you hover over a door knob and it could display manufacturer information, links to websites comparing current prices.  Synths could be linked up with facilities managment and asset management programs to better explore data.  Maybe we could incorporate the synths into a completed Revit model.  That Revit-synth mashup would be useful to visualize and explore projects in a very intuitive manner.

An owner could start out in Virtual Earth, dive into a property via Photosynth and wind up looking at Revit model data on when a mechanical unit was last serviced.

My Own Synth

After all the theorizing, I went out to make my own synth.  I took almost 50 pictures of my office and uploaded them.  I was surprised at how many pictures one would need to make a really good synth.  I uploaded 140 MB of photos, I thought I did a really good job of getting detail, but I was only 57% synthy (which I believe is a measure of how good your synth is).  I don’t think I had as much overlap in pictures as I thought I did.

If you can’t see the synth below, you might have to install a Microsoft browser plugin, but it is worth it.  Then go explore more synths at http://photosynth.net.