Photosynth and the inauguration
So what do you do with the million photos everyone took of the inauguration? Here at Emergent Chaos, we believe that we should throw them all in a massive blender, and see what emerges. A massive blender isn’t a very technical description of Photosynth, but it’s not a bad analogy. The project cleverly figures out what information is available from all the photos, creates a massive, three dimensional model, and makes it available. Here’s “The Moment,” hosted by CNN and Microsoft Live Labs, pixelated by my shrinking it down and adding the frame from a screenshot:
I think it’s tremendously cool. There’s no pre-organization. It’s not some massive machine stitching together a gigapixel image from one place. People take photographs chaotically, submit them sporadically, and what emerges is amazing. Why not go explore?
(Disclaimer: I’m pretty sure I’d say the same thing even if I didn’t work for Microsoft.)
I was very excited at this … because of a visual project I know that could really have fun with this! It looks very cool.
But, in this video / photo community, everyone uses Macs (except for a couple of geeks on linux). Bummer. Yes, I see that there are efforts in that direction…