View from my window
One of the really cool technologies that I have come across recently is photosynth and deepzoom from Microsoft. The core idea behind the technology is to allow people to access large amount of visual information seamlessly. The obvious use case that we use regularly ( I use it almost daily) is maps. There are obviously a lot of uses I can think of for sharing photographic images. Panoramas come to mind. Panoramic images, and extreme Wide angle images are difficult to view because we are constrained by the monitor size. I have not seen good viewers where one can seamlessly see overview and jump in to see details in specific places. The ability to do that is cool.
One of the strengths of the seadragon technology is that they are able to remain resolution independent. Watch this TED lecture to get a lot better understanding of what the technology is capable of. Microsoft has been releasing a series of tools to help people use the technology and the latest tool is the deepzoom composer. To experience some of the cool presentations, one needs to have silverlight (A naive way to explain it is to call it a Adobe Flash competitor) but Microsoft has been very thoughtful to include an AJAX client to view deepzoom compositions.
There are times when we see something that makes us sit up and watch in awe. I felt that when I watched the presentation on Photosynth and I got goose bumps again when I was able to shoot a bunch of images and create the image below in less than 15 minutes. Awesome. Enjoy!
I would suggest you click on the Full Screen icon and Zoom and pan across the image. I have embedded a few high resolution zooms (which are easy to see due to the different exposure settings. Look into them and you will be pleasantly surprised.
I will make things a bit more interesting – Can you find the following images?
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- 1. Laundry
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- 2. Excavator
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- 3. Cyclist relaxing by the water
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- 4. Courts and Ikea
If you do, tell me in the comments the approximate location 
February 16th, 2009 13:16
I watched the Ted lecture many months ago and this is the first time I come across it. Sorry, didn’t have the time now to look for those pics. Just like to mention that there are some misalignment. I think the river appeared twice. The lower inset pic should be shifted higher. Anyway to manually correct such errors?
February 16th, 2009 16:59
Keen eye you have there. I did not spend much effort in compositing the images and thats my fault.
If you are on Windoes, you should give the deepzoom composer a try. It allows you to set the images using a pretty simplified interface. It is possible to align the images more precisely that I have done here.
But the intention was to play around with the tool and it is a fun way to present images and information. Pretty neat.