A Tale of Two Technologies
Yesterday I saw this presentation on two amazing new technologies to come out of Microsoft Live Labs. I’ll summarise them here and then you can play with them yourself at the bottom of this post:
Seadragon
Its aim is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network.
Seadragon really boils down to being able to seamlessly interact with gigabytes of image data. The Microsoft guy makes a very good point that when you’re looking at images the only thing that limits how fast you can zoom in and out should be the number of pixels on your monitor, and by organizing data in an intelligent way (I bet there is some sort of hierarchical tree in there) it is possible to make it so that you can look at hundreds of gigabytes of image data simultaneously, and zoom in and out flawlessly.
Anyway, I’m not doing this justice, so check out the video demonstration above. The Guardian newspaper example is particularly nice
Photosynth
The second technology (and second half of the video) deals with Photosynth. This software marries Seadragon with a clever code that can go through photographs of some space and place them in relation to one another. What I mean by this is that if you had, say, thousands of photographs of the leaning tower of Pisa then the code could calculate the position and field of view of each photograph and combine them into a three dimensional environment that you can then explore
The highlight of the video here is the three-dimensional map of Notre Dame cathedral created entirely computationally from photographs on Flickr.
Anyway, again I’m not doing it enough justice. Try it for yourself here, it works in your browser and is really, really incredible.
