Comments on: Panoramas vs. Photosynth (Part 3): Technical Characteristics

By: Panoramas vs. Photosynth: Qualitative Comparison « All Things Visual

Panoramas vs. Photosynth: Qualitative Comparison « All Things Visual — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 04:36:08 +0000

[...] Part 3: Technical Characteristics [...]

By: Tribe Sourcing, Crowd Sourcing, and Automation « All Things Visual

Tribe Sourcing, Crowd Sourcing, and Automation « All Things Visual — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:39:33 +0000

[...] of the crowd to make sense of a real place, but it’s yet to be seen that this technology can conquer the world. (In fact, I’m looking forward to a new research publication coming out this September). [...]

By: Mok Oh

Mok Oh — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:32:13 +0000

Nice! Thanks. Yes, the actual paper is done by folks from Cornell, University of Washington, and Microsoft (also called Photo Tourism). They will present their new research work at ICCV 2009 (http://www.iccv2009.org/) end of September.

I’m sure it’ll be very interesting and look forward to it implemented and published to the masses.

By: ricardo

ricardo — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:56:58 +0000

Thanks for the reply. One more point – in terms of scalability I saw this on boingboing a few days back: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/04/rome-in-a-day-projec.html It looks like they’ve been able to scale photosynth to city-scale data sets?

By: Mok Oh

Mok Oh — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:07:46 +0000

Hi Ricardo,

Thanks for your comment!

First, very keen point on combining the two. Google has done something there (but not quite photosynthie), and there’s also a surprise coming from EveryScape as well (See video at 2:30 mark on for the demo http://allthingsv.com/2009/06/30/mobile-reality-demo/). So, I do agree that combination would be perhaps the best of both worlds.

BUT, as I said, this to-combine-or-not-to-combine issue could be a “philosophical” thing, where Microsoft wants to make sure that crowd-sourceability-ness remains untarnished for Photosynth. Crowd-sourceability-ness is a VERY powerful notion and a differentiator. (Or perhaps MS will come out with another product).

As to your point of apples-to-oranges, yes, I am trying to make this into an apples-to-apples comparison by saying that the premise is photographically capturing the world, and that by panos, I mean a la EveryScape or Google. (I was hoping that the picture of Dr. Evil made that clear

Thanks.

By: ricardo

ricardo — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 04:53:43 +0000

I think that you are comparing apples and oranges. A panorama is a wide field-of-view image taken from a fixed position. A photosynth is a registered collection of images taken from multiple positions. They are complementary technologies and not two-sides of coin. There is nothing stopping Photosynth from including panoramic images. In fact G’s streetview is taking steps in this direction with their integration of user content.

I think perhaps you are meaning to compare a systematically captured set of panos to an unordered set of images arranged via photosynth – but your article didn’t make this clear.