Sea Dragons and More

Teilo pointed me at a cool YouTube video of Microsoft's Seadragon and Photosynth systems, and for that he gets a cookie. Seadragon is a system for organizing and viewing enormous amounts of image data, with the precept that "...it be limited only be the number of pixels on your screen." The demo shows has presenter Blaise Aguera y Arcas zooming and panning like a fiend through thousands of images, with a speed and fluency that's quite extraordinary. I have few doubts that Blaise's demo machine is some kind of quad core monster with a solid state RAID array and more RAM than a Japanese robot factory, but it really does run nicely.

Photosynth is... well, it's pretty crazy. It processes a large number of images from one location, and constructs a 3D representation of the place based on similarities in the images. The example used in the demo is Notre Dame Cathedral, with thousands of Flickr photos blended and joined to construct the overall shape of the building. A tech preview of Photosynth is available now as well, so I might have to give that a bit of a shake soon.