viz.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from Photosynth

I was delighted this week to have Noel Radley introduce me to an interesting TED talk about Photosynth, a new imaging software created by Microsoft that not only incorporates the ability to get incredible close-ups on images, but also stitches photos together to create larger images.  As they claim on their website, Photosynth “allows you to take a bunch of photos of the same scene or object and automagically stitch them all together into one big interactive 3D viewing experience that you can share with anyone on the web.”  The results, as you can see above, are fairly impressive.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from Photosynth

In a Photosynth image, each of the points represents a photograph.  This point cloud of the Santa Barbara Courthouse Fountain Sculpture is built from 315 separate photos of the fountain.  In the video of the talk, Blaise Aguera y Arcas describes the early research into this done at the University of Washington, and explains the social implications of incorporating photographs of major tourist attractions from a number of people:  these photos themselves create social environments as they allow for shared meta-data, tagging all of the characters painted on the Sistine Chapel’s roof:

However, what also struck me about this is not only the possibility of enhanced images, but also how the nature of the software also shows its gaps:  the move from one image to another is not seamless, but points out the fragmentary nature of its construction.  Each individual piece is still visible.  Photosynth attempts to create a 3D viewing experience, but cannot replace the trip to Italy to see Michelangelo’s work itself.  Instead, it points out the limits of technology to capture that experience, and even the cognitive limits of humans to comprehend such panoramic vistas—in other words, the sublime.  I of course am charmed by the idea of shared data, and look forward to some of the tagging work we’ll be doing at the Blanton next semester, but what Photosynth’s greatest charm for me is demonstrating so beautifully the value of the fragment as much as the power of the whole.