New tool may transform the way we look at digital images

Photos – back then

I was just thinking about all the photos my family took during the 70’s, 80’s, and early 90’s. These printed photos (doubles, of course, because Happy Harry’s drugstore offered free doubles) sit in shoe boxes, stacked neatly in a closet.  Despite my mother’s careful labeling with a felt-tip pen so that we’d “always remember,” not one of these photos has been viewed in the last 15 years.  All that posing and smiling and say-cheesing at the beach and the school and the picnic, and all we’re left with is duplicate copies of fading faces in a closeted box.  Hmnn.

Digital photos – an improvement

We all know how the availability of digital photography to the everyday citizen has changed our worlds.  It seems everyone nowadays has their flickr set or ofoto album.  But still (sorry for the pun), these images often just sit in our digital collections, even with our careful tagging and sorting.

Photosynth – a breakthrough

Fast forward a step further now, where Microsoft rolls out Photosynth.  And get ready to say, “Wow” again.  I thought about trying to distill this fascinating new tool into some witty script, but realized that the Photosynth picture says far more than just a thousand words… Check out this video, where Mr. Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads a dazzling demo of Photosynth, software that could transform the way we look at digital images. Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html