A few weeks ago, Microsoft Photosynth hit the Net. A few of the blogs I follow talked about it, and it looked interesting. I had some time during my conference in Phoenix, so I made a “synth” of my room at the Westin Kierland Resort in Scottsdale, AZ. I downloaded the PDF synth guide with instructions for making a new synth, and set about shooting the room. I wound up with 78 photos.
I shot them in RAW, so I exported them from Lightroom 2 and then started the upload process. This is where my frustration started. It took over 4 hours to upload those pictures. Luckily I had other things to do, like go to the pool and then a dinner engagement, so I left to do that.
When I came back after dinner, the little green box said it was done, and that my photos were “58% synthy”. Whatever that means. I proceeded to load the synth, and was not pleased with the results. For whatever reason, I had expected this to work like other synths I had seen, that acted like a virtual walk-through. I took pictures of the room, the balcony, and the bathroom. I took “approach” photos that I thought my be what synth needed to construct the next scene in the walkthrough. It didn’t do any of this.
You are probably asking why I did all this, and expected a result other than what I achieved. Fair enough. It’s because the PDF instruction set didn’t have specific directions for how to do this. In the absence of those directions, I made an assumption. I wonder how many other people are experiencing this.
Oh well. I don’t really see an application for this anyway. You have to download software to even view these things. When you consider that Flash is on 99% of computers out there, it makes more sense to do virtual tour types of things in Flash than this thing. It’s a solution without a problem.
Apparently, someone I really respect agrees it isn’t ready for widespread usage.
Valley of the Sun
{Edit – 2/4 – For some reason people are coming to this page from a CNN.com story. I can’t find a link to it from that page though. Very weird. If you got here from CNN, would you mind dropping me a note and letting me know what you clicked on, and what you thought you were going to see? Thanks.}
I lived in Arizona for five years while I was in college. Can’t tell you how many times I went to Phoenix in that time (I lived in Prescott). In the last few years, I have gone to Phoenix a few more times for business. And I am going again today. It’s really nice there this time of year, temps should be around 80°F. I am interviewing for an interesting position for a company I have a lot of respect for. I have heard their CEO speak and he is definitely one guy that get’s it. Working for them would be a tremendous opportunity.