Microsoft PhotoSynth

It's been a while since I've posted. But anyway...

Microsoft finally released a public version of Photosynth under the domain Photosynth.net

Photosyth has been previously talked about under the project name SeaDragon in Microsoft Labs and was recently demoed at the MIX'08 conference . It's nice to see it finally become open for public consumption. Like some of the other next-gen computer applications that are beginning to surface (seam carving, audio scope, photo to video mapping, etc), Photosynth pulls your data together and finds matching patterns that it can then build into new and some times fascinating results.

Photosynth is interesting because it can take multiple photos of a location and apply image recognition techiques to then calculate where each picture belongs in 3D space in relation to the others. Then it will map those pixels into a sort of 3D-connect-the-dots environment that you can pan around in and see, virtually, where the original photographer was standing.

One thing you might notice as you pan around in an image space is that the closer you get to any given photo the more detail you will see come into focus (up to a point). Photosynth uses a technique that only displays as many pixels as you need at your current zoom level. This benefits internet viewing because you don't have to download all the data before the image can be displayed. An offshoot of Photosynth was used in the recent Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia site where you can view memorability from any of their locations online. The cool factor in this is that these are not just normal photos. They all allow you to zoom in ... and in ... and in ... and in. The gallery is made up of hundreds of extreme close up and high res photos all seamlessly pieced together by the software. And then all streamed to your browser at just the right resolution, no more and no less. Both applications are very cool to play around with and I can only imagine what sort of technologies might spawn from this in the future.

Imagine, one day we might have computers scanning the Internet for photos of similar locations and automatically piecing them together to build 3D environments which would let anyone view the location from virtually any angle and at various points in history. I'm sure eventually this sort of technology could also be improved upon to generate a more traditional 3D wire frame model that could be mapped to a virtual globe and let users explore it with photo realism. A self generating and updating 3D cyber world. The science fiction writers will probably have fun with that.

And speaking of fiction, Photosynth has already made an appearance in the popular CSI:NY television show where it was used to help the investigators rebuild the scene of a crime and determine who might have been in the right place at the right time to commit the crime. I don't know if Photosynth has actually been used yet to help in crime investigations, but it's an interesting idea.

One day Photosynth may join the crime fighting ranks for real, but for now it has joined the never ending flood of community based websites where you can publish your results and share them with family and friends. Next time you are on vacation take photos of everything you see and from ever angle in which you can see it. Photosynth works best if you can provide it with photos of various angles. As long as their are multiple points in each photo that can be matched up to the same points in another photos, then Photosynth can properly calculate the angles and build your scene. It works a little bit like camera tracking software used in the movie industry; the more distinctly matching points it can find between photos, the better it can map it to it's 3D coordinate system.

There is no telling how this technology will inspire some future inventor and then what amazing new technologies will unfold as a result. Invention usually builds upon ideas from past inventions, so only time will tell. For now just go and have fun connecting all your pixels together.

Microsoft Releases Pro Photo Tools v1.0

Microsoft released an interesting tool for photographers this past week. A photo metadata editing tool. Interesting.

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools v1.0



Upon installation it adds an entry to the right click menu of photos for easy access. Although I seem to have trouble opening multiple photos from the right click without closing the editor each time. However you can drag and drop multiple files into the thumbnail area with ease.

One nice feature is the ability to attach GPS data to older photos and view the location mapped to a Microsoft Maps view. Very much similar to the online Picasa Web photos.

The rest of the data fields seem pretty standard if you own Photoshop, GIMP, or any other higher end photo editor. I would eventually like to see this level of metadata straight from the OS file browser. But for now this is getting there. Perhaps we'll see these same features integrated into the next Windows 7 or a new release of Windows Live Photo Gallery.

MIX '08 Keynotes

I realize much (internet) time has passed since the MIX'08 conference. But I wanted to bring up some of the things I found interesting after watching the online videos of the keynotes. For those of you not familiar, the MIX conference is Microsoft's web development conference where they show off upcoming technologies and discuss ideas.

The MIX site itself is fairly impressive this year and has videos from virtually the whole conference in addition to the key notes. It's very nice for those who can't really afford to fly out to Las Vegas for a week of geek oriented meetings.


Keynote 1 - for Windows Media Player ... or ... for Quicktime

The IE8 demonstration
The demo is a little technical (aimed at developers) but there were a couple of new features worth noting with obvious consumer benefit:

• (00:37:00) - Ajax integration of the HTML5.0 specs. While that sounds really technical, the primary reason this will benefit consumers is they can more easily tie live events into the browser back buttons and other features.
  
• (00:38:30) - Connection detection from the browser with DOM storage for offline submissions. In effect this can give a page the ability to detect if you are online or offline and if you submit a form in situations like posting to a blog or whatever, the page will hold that data until a connection is reestablished.

There were lots of cool stuff in the IE 8 Demonstration like the much talked about standards support in IE8 and how they have apparently submitted a lot of work to the standards body in the interest of further solidifying standards in vague areas specs. If you have the time just go ahead and watch the entire keynote.

The Silverlight Demonstration

• (01:18:00) - The NBC 2008 Olympic coverage looks like it will be the flagship application for Silverlight 2 features. Seriously when this comes online in time for the summer Olympics it will be like nothing ever done before. Unless you just want to wait for the Olympics (on August 8th) then check out this demonstration. It looks seriously impressive.
  
• (01:41:00) - The Hardrock Memorabilia demonstration site contains images of all the Hardrock memorabilia displays across all the stores and merges them into a seamless interface. It uses the Deep Zoom technology from Microsoft's experimental SeaDragon project with high resolution photos and the ability to zoom into or out of the image without a noticeable wait or page change. It's really amazing.
  

Keynote 2 - for Windows Media Player ... or ... for Quicktime

The second keynote doesn't have as much technology demonstrations, but it does contain an interview session with Steve Ballmer that gives an idea of strategies and goals at Microsoft. If you want to get a feel for Steve's personality this is worth the time. It was really cool to see a more informal view of these guys just relaxing and answering questions instead of standing up giving a speech that someone wrote and tweaked.

Overall the MIX'08 conference was a nice little glimpse at what Microsoft plans are for the world of the web and where they plan to push things forward in technology.

Psychology of Communication

I realize this doesn't really have anything to do with pixels, but I just love discussion of psychology and of communication trends in this day and age of internet technology. So a recent article on instant messaging and introverted personalities was right up my alley.

Instant Messaging for Introverts by Joe Kissel
http://db.tidbits.com/article/9544

Being an introvert myself, it was nice to know that I'm not the only one out there who doesn't answer the phone just because it rings. One comment I found interesting was near the end as Joe was discussing how introverts and extroverts should develop a method to meet each other half way instead of requiring the other side to simply adopt what they feel is easiest.

... Several people I discussed this issue with expressed dismay at having had relationships deteriorate due to an unwillingness on another person's part to adapt to changing technology. For example, people who don't use email don't get evites, and so they end up being excluded from parties. Once someone has adapted to a new mode of communication, it becomes harder to communicate with people who use the previous standard, so more often than not, we won't make the effort...

I guess that's the challenge most of the world faces to some degree or another (probably every since the tower of babel). How do we communicate to various types of people across different cultures and different languages. Personality type is another characteristic we can start keeping in mind.

Vision III brings 3D to a 2D screen (sort of)

Vision III appears to have just joined the ranks of those giving us innovative and technological breakthroughs. In essence their parallax scanning technology embeds, into a recorded video, some of the depth cues that your brain normally gets from a three dimensional scene. It's really incredibly cool. Subtle, but there.

The Vision III website ( www.inv3.com ) has some technical descriptions and sample clips which explain and demonstrate the effect. A few good HD examples are Tea Party, Boat House, and George Mason Women's Basketball. The parallax scanning technology seems best suited to shots with a moving camera, because when the camera becomes still you can see the parallax shift on the closer foreground objects. Continuous camera movement seems to disguise the shifting effect.

Take a look at the Boat House clip and you'll notice a couple places, like the chain link fence, where the objects closest to the camera seem to jitter or constantly move in a rotating pattern. If you look carefully you'll notice that it's not the entire frame that is being shaken, but instead it's the foreground objects which seem to have a more exaggerated movement compared to the background objects. The shaking effect is the actually a result of the lens angle being adjusted slightly to simulate the angle difference from one eye to the other. In effect the technology is keeping the camera focused on a single horizon point while moving the view to a different angle. The final result is that images seem to be a little bit more vivid or have just a little bit more POP in comparison to normal video.

It's simply amazing to me that the human brain is able to use that parallax shift on the 2D view of your television screen and extract the extra 3D information about a scene. It even seems to work with a single eyeball. I wonder if one day we will see optical enhancements for people with depth perception impairment.

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

I recently got my hands on a PC adventure game called "Dreamfall: The Longest Journey". This has been a really great piece of entertainment the likes of which I have not seen in a long time.

When I was growing up a popular PC game genre was the adventure game with popular titles such as Space Quest and King's Quest. At the time there was a company called Sierra Online at the forefront of the category producing some of my all time favorite adventures like Conquest of Camelot, Quest for the Longbow, the Laura Bow mysteries, and Gold Rush. (looking back it's interesting that my favorites were the games that didn't generate a long running series) But anyway...

There haven't been many adventure games in recent years, but a few years ago a daring publisher released a game called "The Longest Journey". It was a traditional point and click game with an interesting story (if a little tedious at times). Then recently they released a sequel called "Dreamfall: The Longest Journey" I'll tell you what, these two games provide for some seriously great adventuring if you are into that sort of time consuming entertainment. It's like a good book you can't put down.

If you want to get your hands on the game in the US, look for the recently released packaging of Dreamfall: Game of the Year edition. It includes the original "The Longest Journey" and the sequel "Dreamfall: The Longest Journey", plus the Dreamfall soundtrack is which pretty decent in itself (as far as soundtracks go).

A word of caution however, the games are rated M for mature. Mostly because of rough or coarse language in characters that you meet along the way.

At the time of this writing, Amazon.com has it for about $25 and considering that it's two full games plus a sound track CD it's well worth the money. And if you are new to the adventure game genre, it's a great way to get your feet wet (so to speak).

Vista SP1 - release announcement

Well it looks like Microsoft has finally released Vista SP1 to manufacturing (as nearly every tech blog on the web seems to be reporting about). If you want to read up on the nitty-gritty specs, go and get a copy of this PDF from Microsoft.

Notable changes in Windows Vista SP1.pdf

Although I haven't had a chance to test SP1 first hand yet, my favorite list of improvements are:

1. SP1 reduces the number of UAC (User Account Control) prompts from 4 to 1 when creating or renaming a folder at a protected location.
   As someone who likes to keep the start menu organized, the constant double prompting to double confirm a copy, create, or rename, just about drove me crazy. If this has been improved the way it is suggested, I will be most pleased.
   
2. Enables support for hotpatching, a reboot-reduction servicing technology designed to maximize uptime. It works by allowing Windows components to be updated (or "patched") while they are still in use by a running process. Hotpatch-enabled update packages are installed via the same methods as traditional update packages, and will not trigger a system reboot.
   Now, I am really hoping this will fix the "middle of the night" reboots from Windows Automatic Updates. One thing that has bugged me about Vista and the auto update was how many times I would come in the next morning and realized that an update had rebooted a system that was in the middle of a work in progress. I eventually just turned of the auto update feature. Perhaps with SP1 I'll be able to trust this again. We'll see.
   
3. Improves responsiveness when doing many kinds of file or media manipulations. For example, with Windows Vista today, copying files after deleting a different set of files can make the copy operation take longer than needed. In SP1, the file copy time is the same as if no files were initially deleted.
   Man, this is another one of those "about time" fixes. There are about four points listed on page 9 that talk about file management and copying improvements. I don't know what my exact problem sources were, but hopefuly this will help the annoying issues I have been having with moving or deleting files that were in the middle of a thumbnail generation. And any general speed improvements (which seem slower than XP) will be welcome.
   
4. Improves reliability of OS updates by making them more resilient to unexpected interruptions, such as power failure.
   Ok, I don't know about anyone else, but this has the potential to make my life easier. I run tech support for a few systems in Africa where they have a tendency to loose power a couple times each day. This of course makes it inevitable that a power loss will occur during a hotfix installation. It has happened with XP a couple of times cause system problem. Maybe this will reduce the long term chances of problems with that issue.

And finally, the simple fact that over a hundred megabytes of hot fixes will be wrapped up into a single download (that can be mailed to Africa, for instance) will be enough to justify the existence of SP1 for me.

I really wish Microsoft would make a habit of issuing a service pack or hotfix roll up once a year. When trying to support multiple systems connected at dialup speeds or (worse) limited cell phone minutes, it becomes a bit ridiculous to require 100+ MB of updates anytime you do a new install. SP1 will be a relief in that area alone (at least for a few months).

My favorite Super Bowl 2008 commercials

Ok. I know everyone is probably making their own lists, but I just wanted to say that the E-Trade commercials from the 2008 Super Bowl were absolutely at the top of my list of favorites this year.


E-Trade Baby



E-Trade Baby II



I think I may actually laugh out loud every single time I watch these. And I've watched them ten times already.