Photosynth and the art of the amazing 360 panorama

Hey, everyone, Neil here. For my second post on the blog, I'm going to talk a little about a Microsoft Research project called Photosynth.

Some of you may have already heard about this as it's been available on iOS for about a year or so (and recently made available on Windows Phone). It's a really neat photo app that lets you take 360 degree panoramas using your phone. It's incredibly easy to use; it actually takes the pictures for you as you move your phone around. Once your panorama is stitched together you can upload to photosynth.net, Facebook, Twitter, and Bing Maps (and embed them on your website once they're uploaded). You can geotag your panoramas to show where they were taken, and show them on Bing Maps. You can also view and comment on other user's panoramas on the website (kinda like Instagram), and there are some absolutely fascinating panoramas out there.

There are quite a few novel applications for this technology. You could embed panoramas of the front and back yards of the house you are selling, or even each room. You could make your vacation photo album even more amazing by showing the entire location, instead of a couple of snapshots. My brother is thinking of using this to document the rivers and streams he is studying. There are pretty much endless possibilities for this technology.

Stitching 360 panoramas isn't confined to the phone. Microsoft Research also created desktop software that will stitch together pictures from any source to create a panorama, called the Image Composite Editor (ICE). The software is incredibly powerful, with the ability to stich pictures in gigapixel resolution. Instead of stitching panoramas with your Lumia's 8MP resolution, you could stitch together 200 photos you took with your Canon Mark III. How cool would that look.

Check out a sample panorama that I made using ICE from my trip to Denali National Park a few years ago. I took these pictures with the intention of making them a panorama later on, but never got around to it until I found out about ICE.

Here is a sample Photosynth taken with my Lumia the other night. There was some really harsh side lighting from the sun, and I had a hard time lining up the shots to get the siding to stitch together correctly. If I get a chance, I'll update this post with a better panorama.

And here is one of my favorite photosynths so far (taken by user ssesynth). Pretty amazing.