By Perry, 1 year and 2 months ago
The amazing future
Watch this seven plus minute video and prepare to be amazed at what an application called Photosynth can do. It's architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, demonstrates and describes the technology and what lies ahead. (Link courtesy of Michael K. Bergman of AI3.) It's so amazing, I almost want to begin exercising just to ensure I stay around long enough to see where all this is leading. Wow.
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6 comments
#1. Paul Moor, 1 year and 2 months ago
As Shakespear put it (in «The Tempest»): «O brave new world that has such people in it!»
#2. Michael Neel, 1 year and 2 months ago
I remember seeing some of this when Microsoft first acquired the company. The impresses me on two levels; one the ability to run a system linked to such hires imagery and have the PC act like it's nothing. Second, the connecting the images (which, yes doesn't impress me as much as #1 - and I'm probably one of only a handful that thinks this way =p)
#3. Jerry, 1 year and 2 months ago
The paradoxical nature of our species becomes conspicuous when our capability to accomplish such amazing feats of technological wizardry are contrasted with our behavior in Darfur.
#4. Perry, 1 year and 2 months ago
@Paul. You're right that it is a new world. I'm not sure what to make of it, but I feel a bit like a kid in a candy store as I think about all that is out there to discover in this field.
@Jerry. I don't disagree with your observation at all. We as a species are nothing if not paradoxical.
#5. Perry, 1 year and 2 months ago
Mike, for reasons that totally escape me, your comment from 6/5 was caught by Akismet as spam. When I was clearing that out this morning I just happened to see it and rescued it from the trash heap to which it had been relegated. I can't see anything in it that would have triggered such an action, so I'm baffled.
I'm impressed by the two things you mention too. In particular, I like the ability to «drill down» into the photographs that extensively for what my son Mike and I refer to as «pixel peeping,» which for us means looking critically at a photograph at its highest resolution to detect flaws.
I do wonder what kind of computer it takes to handle such an application so smoothly and would like to believe that maybe a «normal» system could do it, but I have my doubts about that.
#6. Colm Smyth, 1 year and 2 months ago
I'm rarely really impressed by technology, but, well, wow. The infinite zoom effect is technically merely interesting but as a user experience it is just fantastic.
However it is the recognition and correlation of images that is the really impressive part of this demo - in three dimensions!
Of course, no one has mentioned what kind of CPU power is needed to actually do the edge detection/image-«fingerprinting», capture, indexing and lookup, but it's certainly several (I'd guess 6-10) orders of magnitude more difficult than Google has to do just using it's brute-force recursive link-counting, caching and (optional) document conversion.
I can see this needing a SETI-like approach where users give up a portion of their CPU to do the image analysis. I'd certainly run it, just so long as I can ensure my laptop's cycles are not being wasted indexing porn!
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