Back in February 2006 Microsoft acquired Seadragon giving them access to their proprietary technology that will ‘change the way we use screens’ and provides a smooth browsing platform for visual information.
Roll forward almost 2 years and I am out in Tenerife at the ABTA Travel Convention talking to Graham Donoghue, New Media Director at TUI Travel Plc. He had just given a press briefing and in answer to a question about how travel would look in 10 years time had talked about holo-decks and experiencing your chosen destination in a 3D environment before booking your holiday.
I can’t imagine everyone in the audience will believe that this will happen, but even the sceptics would be foolish to not understand the sentiment that technology is moving incredibly fast, and don’t forget that nearly everything that has happened online has happened in the last 10 years.
And who is to say he is not right anyway.
The very next day at the same convention, Mel Carson from Microsoft speaks and includes a video promo of Microsoft’s Photosynth. I wonder how many people in the audience who also attended Graham’s press briefing realised that they were looking at one execution of Graham’s predicted future world.
I urge you to take a few minutes of your life to watch the video and then download the pre-beta software to experience it in full. I was as amazed as I was the first time I downloaded Google Earth; you realise that you are interacting with something that will change user behaviour forever.
Roll forward almost 2 years and I am out in Tenerife at the ABTA Travel Convention talking to Graham Donoghue, New Media Director at TUI Travel Plc. He had just given a press briefing and in answer to a question about how travel would look in 10 years time had talked about holo-decks and experiencing your chosen destination in a 3D environment before booking your holiday.
I can’t imagine everyone in the audience will believe that this will happen, but even the sceptics would be foolish to not understand the sentiment that technology is moving incredibly fast, and don’t forget that nearly everything that has happened online has happened in the last 10 years.
And who is to say he is not right anyway.
The very next day at the same convention, Mel Carson from Microsoft speaks and includes a video promo of Microsoft’s Photosynth. I wonder how many people in the audience who also attended Graham’s press briefing realised that they were looking at one execution of Graham’s predicted future world.
I urge you to take a few minutes of your life to watch the video and then download the pre-beta software to experience it in full. I was as amazed as I was the first time I downloaded Google Earth; you realise that you are interacting with something that will change user behaviour forever.
So what’s so special about it?
It contains an incredible amount of technical geekiness that builds up databases of images based on their content. For instance, take a picture of Notre Dame Cathedral and allow the software to find other visual resources of the same subject automatically, including other photographs, posters and even whole books. The software will stitch them together with your original photo and allow you to move through space viewing the same subject from multiple positions. Annotate your picture and everyone’s pictures become digitally annotated with the same information.
This is a whole new interface for searching and discovering information.
What is also of interest to me is that it is an emergent output from social media content. Social media is high on my agenda currently; we have dedicated programs to understand it and learn how to interact with it as a brand over at iCrossing, and its principals have also become central to a new methodology of media planning.
In biology, Emergence is the concept that complex environments and societies can emerge out of the behaviour of simple organisms; think of ants and ant colonies or people and cities. In each case the sum of the parts is more intelligent than the individual components could ever be.
What Microsoft have done with project Seadragon is to create an intelligent and complex software application that allows hugely complex 3D, dynamic environments to be created automatically from a set of simple rules. The Notre Dame example used in the video above was created by searching for images of Notre Dame on Flickr, a Yahoo-owned photo site with over 2 billion images uploaded by individual users.
Social media has changed the way users interact and communicate with each other, tools such as Photosynth are taking this to a whole new level, and add a layer of applications that generate solutions from simple components.
My prediction for the future is that we will create applications that produce outputs so complex that we stop understanding how they actually work, but marvel in their abilities.
:~Dax~:
2 comments:
I just found this comment by the project lead:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=220870
OK, I joined!
This response has just been overwhelming. Thank you all!
Very briefly, the multires issues raised by jsampsonPC and others basically revolve around the question of how an image can be represented in a way that allows the whole thing to be accessed at very low resolution, or a small part to be accessed at high resolution, or anything in between. Also, each such access needs to involve limited server disk IO and limited processing on the client side. The ideas first used to implement this efficiently and elegantly were developed in part by my old thesis advisor, Ingrid Daubechies. Do searches on "wavelets", "wavelet image compression", and "JPEG2000" to learn more. We don't use JPEG2000 (or, in fact, wavelets) in Photosynth, although when Seadragon was an independent company we did use JPEG2000. The basic ideas are similar, though. The Seadragon collection model generalizes these multiresolution concepts to collections of images (or other, non-image visual content, like text and vector maps), not just single images. Again, the design requirement was to allow massive collections of massive images to be opened remotely without too much work either for the server or the client.
Astronomy and microscopy applications: YES. Among many others. We hope to get to a point where there's an open platform to develop on, so that these ideas and applications can be developed the right way by the people who really understand what should be made and how.
Beta coming soon.
cheers
Blaise
Agreed. Photosynth technology is an amazing new way to mashup geospatial and photographic data in a way that is 'geeky cool' and useful! Always cool to see new tech profiled in this way...thanks!
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