Alright so this little thing has absolutely fried my noodle this morning!

A company in America called SeaDragon (recently acquired by Microsoft) have a written a piece of software which has a unique rendering engine to display images. Instead of loading an image and rendering all the information (or attempting to), the software appears to resample the image so that it only renders as much information as it can display (i.e pixels) at one time. This means you can have a very highly detailed image and you can interact with that image very very quickly and smoothly.

Now that unto itself is not that amazing however, they have combined this technology with a 3D rendering engine which is able to take a photos and using some pretty tricky algorithms determine similarities between the 3D model and the photo and display them in such a way that you can virtually walk through the space and view everything at an almost infinite level of detail.

As far as I am concerned if you need a way to explain the semantic web and how user generated content is going to revolutionise how we interact and access information then this is it!

Check it out at:

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
(Internet Explorer, Windows XP SP2 or Vista only)


For more info check out:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynth

Dan Oxnam, Interaction Director

Labels: Technology