Photosynth is an amazing photo and text software environment that will change the way you look at photos forever.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas presents a demo of Photosynth at the TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference. He shows how his new software links photos together spatially and hints at the value Photosynth adds to your photo collection. The demo shows Photosynth creating amazing multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features just by scanning photos from Flickr. It creates a spatial map and places all photos of an object (such as Notre Dame, Paris) into a collage that is easy and intuitive to navigate.
While the spatial 3-D image collage is amazing, the information created when everyone’s photo tags are linked is even more amazing. Photosynth creates a dense information swarm around the objects it links together.
Photosynth is the brainchild of Blaise Aguera y Arcas, he also created Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft in 2006), the visualization technology that gives Photosynth its amazingly smooth digital rendering and zoom capabilities.
Seadragon and Photosynth create an interface that will make working with text and images on a screen preferable to working with paper. With the exception of reading at the beach, I can’t see any advantage for paper.
It's hard to actually imagine how massive the paper industry is; its
impact on the environment, the carbon emissions, the waste, the trees
used. But I like paper. I specifically like words, which make me part
of my living and, as far as I'm concerned, make the world a much better
place.
