I'm always on the look out for new tools, and I've been meaning to try photosynth for a while. Being a Windows product, its not mac friendly, so It's taken until a pc entered the family for me to give it a go.
I'm already pretty happy with it, it adds greater verisimilitude than the panoramas I've been creating recently, so should help communication over the distance of space and time.
Greetings, fellow synther!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you finally were able to give Photosynth a whirl.
As an aside, Photosynth.net is host to both photosynths and panoramas. They also have spin movies on their roadmap. http://bit.ly/spinmovies I'm hoping we'll see those this year, but there's been no official announcement as to timeframe yet.
You can upload panoramas to your Photosynth account from 3 different apps:
From Microsoft ICE: http://bit.ly/microsoftice
(Great for high resolution + simplicity)
From Photoshop for Windows: http://bit.ly/pstops
(Useful for image editing before upload + publishing panos from other stitchers)
From Photosynth's mobile apps like the one for iOS: http://bit.ly/photosynthforios
(Low resolution, but very handy, with an addictive interactive shooting mode)
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All panoramas on Photosynth.net are viewable on iOS devices in Safari in medium resolution and can be launched into the native app from Mobile Safari to view full resolution.
Photosynths need the unofficial iSynth app http://bit.ly/isynth to be viewed on iOS (which sadly doesn't load the full resolution photos).
The folks at Microsoft are in the process of building a new viewer to replace the Silverlight viewer which will enable the opening of photosynths, panoramas, spin movies, videos, audio, etc. in CSS3/HTML5 Canvas/WebGL. Stay tuned to http://bit.ly/readwriteworld for news on that front.
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Photosynth has some very unique advantages over panorama stitching, but requires users to change how they think about shooting to be a little more like using your camera as a 3D scanner if you want the most out of the experience.
Useful resources for the Photosynth beginner:
Photosynth Photography Guide: http://photosynth.net/help.aspx#photosynthhelp
Video Crash Course: http://bit.ly/howtosynth
Conversations from your Photosynth peers:
http://bit.ly/sinkorsynth
http://bit.ly/shootingforreconstruction
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Hopefully your readers will find these useful.
Your fellow photosynther,
.nl