I was in Washington Courthouse, OH for a funeral today and took a moment to take some photos of a static steam display in a park there and upload it to Microsoft Photosynth. You can see the results here:
I didn’t have much time, and I was working through chain-link fence, but hopefully this will be of interest to fans of C&O, Kanawah, or Berkshire locomotives.
I’d encourage others to try making synths. The hardest part is taking a few hundred photos - the free software does the rest. Be sure to post links!
I only had 154 photos (taken with my cell phone) - to see all you can push the “Play” button in 3D mode or look at the images in Grid mode. I believe I’ve read that 300-500 images would be better for a more connected synth of a subject like this.
Note: A little explanation on how to use the viewer might be in order. In the upper right there are some leaf-shaped buttons. 3D gives you a 3D view of the locomotive assembled by the software. The upper right-most button allows you to switch to different clusters of images which is important since my photos were only 17% synthy. If they were 100% synthy it’d be a lot more intuitive to navigate - but as I said, conditions weren’t ideal.
I believe many viewers are suffering a paucity of information, and perhaps trust, about your topic. Of course I should only speak for myself; but in that case, I know nothing about this subject and am highly averse to installing an unkown, if free, programme to my computer simply to view “something”.
I don’t want to sound churlish. I am simply voicing my own circumstances and surmising that the vast majority of viewers here will know nothing about “synths”. And we’re fighting with add-ons and such all the time.
Not building confidence in this site was the fact that I had to back-page quickly twice in order to get out of it…not something one should have to do.
Considering you need a web browser to view my post, I imagined that anyone seeking more information on Photosynth before clicking the link would be able to do a quick search and read until their little heart is content.
As for your back-page issues, I tested it in IE and after page load, a single “back” button click was sufficient to return me to this thread. So goulishly nefarious indeed! [}:)]
Unfortunately it is a newer technology and will work best on newer hardware. Here’s a list of the system requirements:
Photosynth runs on Windows XP SP2 and SP3, and Vista, and requires IE7 or Firefox 2 or 3. There are a variety of video cards out there and we haven’t tested them all, but the general requirement is that you have a minimum of 32mb of video RAM, with 64MB or more recommended. DirectX7 is recommended. You should have at least 1gb of system RAM and a 2.0GHz CPU to get the most out of Photosynth. You’ll also need a broadband network connection. On the Mac, Bootcamp will work, but not Parallels.
I guess I should probably add that the phone was an HTC Mogul (2 megapixel) with an 8 GB MicroSD card. The photos for this Synth amounted to just 10 MB of photos. Much like Deep Zoom Composer, Synth streams the images to you as you need them - so you don’t get a 10 MB hit all at once. The technology is also known as Seadragon.
I’m also running Live Mesh on my phone so it can be uploading photos to my PC while I drive back from an adventure. Why drive home then find a cable and wait for the images to transfer when they could transfer over the network and be ready by the time I get home?
A railfan on Twitter saw my photosynth and sent me a link to his Synth of a Frisco locomotive (#19). His is 99% synthy because he didn’t have a chain-link fence obstructing the view of the locomotive.
Okay I am officially impressed, thats some system you got! My phone makes noise and then somebody I know will be on the other end. Or somebody I don’t know sometimes…
A friend of mine has a higher powered computer, I’ll try to check your link out on his system when I get a chance.
