I plan to live forever. So far, so good.

Photosynth is really two remarkable technical achievements in one product: a viewer for downloading and navigating these complex visual spaces and a “synther” for creating them in the first place. Together they make something that seems impossible quite possible: reconstructing the 3D world for sets of flat photographs. Basic project history:

• In 2006 Microsoft acquired small, Seattle-area startup Seadragon, whose technology is capable of delivering a buttery smooth experience browsing massive quantities of visual information over the Internet. It is all the detail you want, exactly when you want it, with predictable performance regardless of the amount of data—from megapixels to gigapixels.
• The same year, from the groundbreaking research of Noah Snavely (UW), Steve Seitz (UW), and Richard Szeliski (Microsoft Research), a prototype called ‘photo tourism’ was born. The idea was simple: given a few dozen or few hundred photos of a place, is there enough information to reconstruct a 3D model of that place? The advanced computer vision techniques pioneered in pursuit of this goal form the basis of the synther.

Together these incredible tools are the foundation that makes Photosynth work. The synther requires large amounts of visual data to generate its 3D environments, and Seadragon technology makes it possible to put it all together and visualize it.

Seeing the promise in the product, Microsoft Live Labs built a small startup team to incubate the Photosynth project. Collaborating with teams around Microsoft, including Virtual Earth, Microsoft Research, Windows Live, and others, they have been hard at work making Photosynth more than just a prototype, creating an experience that anyone can enjoy and where anyone can create something amazing.

First there was the snapshot, and then came video. Now there is Photosynth, a new service available at photosynth.com that will change the way you experience and share photos.

You can share or relive a vacation destination or explore a distant museum or landmark. With a nothing more than digital camera and some inspiration, you can use Photosynth to transform regular digital photos into a three-dimensional, 360-degree experience. Anybody who sees your synth is put right in your shoes, sharing in your experience, with detail, clarity and scope impossible to achieve in conventional photos or videos.

Synths constitute an entirely new visual medium. Photosynth analyzes each photo for similarities to the others, and uses that data to build a model of where the photos were taken. It then re-creates the environment and uses that as a canvas on which to display the photos.

Experience it at photosynth.com

The Perseids, probably the best-known meteor shower, will have their maximum on August 12th 11h30m — 14h00m UT with expected ZHRs (hourly rates in theoretical perfect conditions) around 100, but activity already picks up in the second half of July, and continues until the end of August.

The waxing gibbous Moon will be setting between local midnight and 01h30m on August 12/13 for the mid-northern latitudes best-placed to follow the shower (moonset is progressively earlier for places further north), leaving some dark skies to cover whatever happens. For these same locations, the Perseid radiant is viably observable from 22h — 23h local time onwards, gaining altitude throughout the night, so circumstances overall are quite favourable.

The predicted maximum would be best-viewed from places in and around the northern Pacific Ocean, including the extreme west of North America west as far as extreme eastern Japan and China, assuming it happens as expected. The only negative aspect to the shower is the impossibility of covering it from the bulk of the southern hemisphere.

More info on the 2008 Perseids, from NASA.

Gartner Research announced today that the number of computers currently in use worldwide has now surpassed one billion machines. That’s nearly one machine for every six people!

As computers become bigger and bigger parts of our lives, one can only wonder how the world might change with the next billion. Will things get better or worse? Will the continued proliferation of computers usher in a golden age of free knowledge and human networking, or will they isolate us from each other by allowing us to see and hear only what we wish?

On a less philosophical note, how many of us have old machines just collecting dust? I know I’ve got a few myself… There are all sorts of potential projects or uses for those old machines and hardware, some helpful, some not… Any ideas to put them to good use, rather than just wasting space until they find their way to the garbage?