Of SeaDragon and Photosynth

Last Friday I had my first placement visit from my Placement Advisor. It went well. Very well indeed. Not only from the point of view of my placement but it also turns out that my advisor is leaving his current job and moving to be the "enterprise" manager of the Uni. He also has contacts with Microsoft and was even in the meeting where Linda Hole tried to get hold of a MS Surface box for us to play with.

During my meeting with him we got talking about the Virtual Projects I am currently working on and when he went to talk to Andy about me they got talking about it all. And it seems that we may be able to work with MS on something after all. They recently bought up some software called SeaDragon. Which, if you haven't heard of it, is a technology that allows super fast streaming of data across a network no matter the amount of data you are handling. In basic it turns it is only downloading the data that can be seen on your screen, which is a fixed amount that will never ever change. This means that it can handle a huge collection of image files, for example, all high resolution and you can zoom in and out of them and scroll all about.



The video shows, incase you can't have audio or you haven't seen it, 800 high resolution images being streamed across a network at roughtly 500Kb/s (Bits not Bytes). That works out at, if the images were all 20MB in size (118 Megapixel images here), roughly 15.625GB. At it streams it pretty damn smoothly. To me, thats pretty special and my hat goes off to the guys that created SeaDragon.

However, MS have now bought this software and used it in their new product which is currently in development called Photosynth. This is, in my opinion, one of the best things MS has produced in a long time and if they market it right and release the program at the right price could be a killer app for photo professionals. I can see a multitude of ways to use it, which I won't divulge in case MS reads this and nicks them!

Basically Photosynth takes a whole host of images from an image library, Flickr for example. These images are all of the same thing. Lets say of the Eiffel Tower. It then looks at all these images and starts mapping them out in a 3D space so you can then move around a model of the subject in question and as you move over an area that has a photo it fades in and you can see the object from that angle. You can then move to another side and view another photo. Zoom right in to seem some detail and then zoom out and on to the next photo. It streams all the data of the net using the SeaDragon technology and thus makes it smooth and a pleasure to use. I personally think they should put in the ability to view a collage of all the different photos to create a 3D model that you can move around as at the moment you can only view one photo at a time. If they could try and map the photos to the 3D frame Pho creates that would be great.



So, Andy and I are looking at getting into contact with MS and seeing about getting our hands on Pho to play with it an maybe be one of the first Universities (or companies?) to use it for a practical use. Fingers crossed!

My personal touch for today is how to get around the blight that has stopped the non-US listeners of Pandora listening because we don't live within the US. And this is, globalPandora. It seems to be a touch slow, but that might be because I'm currently logged on to Last.fm at the moment. But it does indeed work, and with no adverts!