We explore our surroundings, with every technology we have. From text to audio to maps to photos. Now there is a new technology freely available to represent place - Photosynth. Photosynth comes from Microsoft and you can build up your own 3d environment with your digital camera and the Photosynth software.
This is how it works:
- You make a lot of photos of your surrounding with as many overlapping as possible. Walk around and change zoom and angle.
- Go to http://www.photosynth.net and download and install the software plugin in your web browser.
- The software automatically compares all your photos and finds out how they go together and uploads them to the web.
- The result is a 3d virtual representation which can be seen by anyone via the Internet.
The optimistic overall goal of the developers is to create a 3d photo-realistic representation of the whole world.
Still there are some limitations and drawbacks:
- Creating a good Photosync takes patience and practice.
- Every spot in the environment has to be included in at least three photos.
- No Mac version until now.
- You cannot create a private version of your composed photos.
- Alternative Quicktime VR (available for years).
[via David Pogue, NYT]
Biside high resolution aerial photos of the provinicial capitals of Austria Herold.at provides enhanced photos for Wiener Neustadt, Wels, Villach, Kitzbühel, Steyr, Hartberg, Linz-Umgebung, Leoben und Kufstein. This was communicated by the Herold company on Tuesday.
They assert that their service is ahead of others in Austria:
“Damit beweisen wir einmal mehr, dass wir bei Luftbildaufnahmen von Österreich eindeutig die Nase vorne haben”, so Herold-CEO Thomas Friess.
The high resolution photos were taken on October 2007 with an altitude of 2500 meters. It is not possible to recognize any peole on the records.
Simmilar to other services like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or Live Maps the user can choose between “map“, “satellite” or “hybrid” view. Additional Points of Interests (POI), like ATMs, hotels, parking areas, post offices, restaurants or gas stations can be visualized.
[via derStandard]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
The Geotag Icon is intended as a web “standard” icon for identifying geotagged content to humans.
The advent of inexpensive GPS devices and free tools like Google Maps or Flickr Map mean that more and more people are associating their content (typically blog posts or photos) with a specific geographic location. Such “geotagging” stores coordinates within metadata or microformat tags—where machines can find them but people can’t.
That’s where the Geotag Icon comes in. It provides a visual reference to a map link, or if no link is yet made helps viewers recognize the geographic relevance of the content.
It’s free, easy to use and helps us all visualize the developing semantic web.
[www.geotagicons.com]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
According to flickr about 5 percent of all pictures on the web are geotagged. I personally belief this estimation is too high. I think maybe 5 % of all flickr pictures are geotagged, because they provide a relatively convientent way to geotag uploaded pictures, but the techniques to geotag photos is still too complicated.
Normally it should be possilbe to integrate a GPS chip to reach digital camera, the prices for GPS chips are not high any more. For each picture taken metainformation about the location should be stored.
Some interesting and open points to this topic are:
- Indoor photographs: How should locational information be gathered for photos taken in buildings.
- Privacy: What is about locational pricacy?
[via Anick Jesdanun]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
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