Microsoft Turns Photo Albums into 3D Worlds

At SIGGRAPH 2006 this week, researchers from Microsoft Corp. and the University of Washington will present a new photo-browsing system that enables people to combine their photos with thousands of others collected on the Internet to present a detailed 3-D model which gives viewers the sensation of smoothly gliding around the scene from every angle. The prototype technology, called Photosynth, can be previewed here , and will be available for download later this year. Noah Snavely, a graduate student in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, and associate professor Steven Seitz collaborated with Microsoft researcher Richard Szeliski to develop the technology that was the genesis of Photosynth. Their work combined both new and established techniques in computer vision; image-based modeling and rendering; image browsing, retrieval and annotation; and key-point detection and matching to present unstructured collections of photos in a 3-D perspective. As people navigate around the model with their mouse and click on specific photos, the system smoothly transitions between images to create an evocative sense of movement. “It’s like a hybrid of a slide show and a gaming experience that lets the viewer zoom in to see greater detail or zoom out for a more expansive view,” said Szeliski, manager of the Interactive Visual Media Group within Microsoft Research. “This is a revolutionary way for people to interact with photos in a 3-D context that more closely resembles the place where the images were captured.“Demos, screen shots, the research paper and other information on Photo Tourism can be found on the University of Washington and Microsoft Research Web sites.