Photosynth Can Show You the World (or, Maybe Not)

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:30:06 +0000

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.

The New Facebook Layout and Visual Culture

micklethwait — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:32:49 +0000

Maybe it's trite to bring up the new Facebook layout, but the current stink about the second major redesign of the site in less than a year exposes a frightening level of mass narcissism in the evolution of graphic design. For just a random sampling of news articles and blog postings on this topic, just look here, and here, and here (Facebook's own poll of user reactions).

The new Facebook layout undertakes some interesting experiments in the cognitive and communicative intersections of text and imagery (the classic domain of visual rhetoric), and people really don't seem to like it. There is a certain delicious irony in Facebook's users mistaking their unremunerated labor generating Facebook's content for some kind of squatter's rights ownership of the design: all the huffing and puffing about the changes simply generates more click-through ad revenue.

Given all the real problems in the world right now, an astute spectator will likely notice the conspicuous absence of Facebook from the graphic design Tim posted below. This is good news for people interested in visual rhetoric--that people are taking graphic design seriously enough to threaten boycotts against the world's biggest social networking site over the visual 'feel' of their new design--but bad news for everyone else.

viz. - user generated content

Photosynth Can Show You the World (or, Maybe Not)

The New Facebook Layout and Visual Culture