Remember the video of a 3D rendition of Piazza San Marco in Venice using hundreds of pictures? CNN is using the Photosynth technology with the aid of the public in order to do the same with Obama's inauguration ceremony. They ask everyone there to take a wide angle, mid-zoom and full zoom photo of the ceremony with their cameras and e-mail them in. I'm not sure how well this is going to work, the main focus of this is Obama, who is a little more mobile than the buildings of the Piazza, so in order for this to work very well they'd have to all be taken at the same time. However, it will still give a 3D picture of the stage at least.
Not so, if you look at the original application of photosynth, then you'll see that in addition to the hi res stitching, it also was designed to place a sequence of events in relation to a space. I think what you see on the web now is a first generation that was a bit neutered. Check out the original ideas here. Look for minute 2:38ish. The sequence of the climber in relation to the over all landscape.
photosynth is a cool technology, but i don't really see how the inauguration is a good candidate for demonstrating it. seems like MS is just trying to latch onto the obama publicity wave, same as everyone else. heh, those pictures were taken a few hundred meters from my house. photosynth might be amazing tech, but it still can't beat my living room window
I think it's more the fact that they want to capture a single event rather than a place with it, and Obama's inauguration is probably the biggest event we'll have for some time. Also, with the video of the guy on a cliff face, it was all taken from 1 camera so it was easy to piece together the sequence. With the ceremony there will probably be hundereds of people participating, which means there won't be a nice smooth sequence between photos if it's going by timeframe.
Then they can recreate that CSI episode where for some reason someone decided to take a photo at exactly the same time and one person decided to take a pic of some guys cufflink really zoomed up.
