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09 May 2011
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360 degrees, to be exact. Photosynth from Microsoft brings users the ability to take 360 degree photos of their surroundings, which can be published at a later date on either Facebook, Photosynth, or Bing Maps. The technology used isn't perfect, but it's accessible, simple, and best of all, free. Read on for the run down.
I'm sure most of us are familiar with the epic phenomenon that is Google Streetview. This feature of Google Maps allows you to get down to road level and take a look at what's around you. Photosynth is essentially identical, except this time round, you can take the photos yourself. This means you can show your family back home the entirety of your shoddy motel room, or how amazing the view from the top of a particular mountain looked. If photo's capture a moment, Photosynth captures the reality.
I mentioned it was simple to use, and I meant it. It does almost everything for you, you just have to swivel the camera. You open the app, tap the screen, and move the camera slowly round. It takes individual photos, and you'll hear a beep followed by a click after each photo. There's a small rectangle on screen, which acts as a frame showing you where to put the camera, and each time you take a photo, more of the blanks are filled in. The areas you haven't pictured are shown by black and grey rectangles, so it's very obvious where you need to put the camera to fill in those holes.
Now before you get too excited, I should probably mention that it's not perfect. It's really, really good, but not perfect. You'll get the odd deformed piece of scenery, particularly long, complex things, such as patterned ceilings. It also occasionaly struggles with taking a picture, although swivelling the phone back towards the place you were before usually fixes that. I tried to post a sample picture directly into this article so you could see what I mean, but unfortunately you'll have to go to Photosynth's website.
Which brings me to my next point - Photosynth.net. This is a free service provided by Microsoft that allows you to upload your creations for the world to see. Anyone you give the link to can see the picture, and you have the option of publishing it so that anyone with access to photosynth.net can have a look-see. You can upload directly from your iPhone to either Facebook, Bing maps, or Photosynth, although Facebook wasn't working for me, perhaps because I was trying to do it over 3G. If anyone wants to let me know if it works over Wi-Fi, that'd be great.
Uploading doesn't take long, but that's because the photo automatically gets shrunk to around 5 megabytes, maybe 6. This means it's easy on your data allowance, and uploads fast, but it also means the pictures aren't super high quality. They're ok, but it's not amazing, and I would like to see an option for higher quality, even if it did take longer to stitch the photos together. Not that it's amazingly fast with that at the moment, it takes an average of around 40-50 seconds to stich a full 360 panorama, obviously the less photos you take, the less time it will need to stitch them together.
But overall the app is great. Microsoft has done brilliantly with this app, and the availabilty of a free service to publish them is a nice touch. Add to that the fact that even though the app is free, it doesn't have any adds, and is as polished as any other app on the store, and you're onto a winner. The few quirks with stitching aren't enough to knock Photosynth of it's proverbial pedestal as the greatest 360 panorama maker out there, and if they can add an option for higher quality, then I can see it's popularity increasing hugely. Check out this link for an example of what a finished product looked like, and see if you can spot the quirks. Just to give you a hint, my ceiling is perfectly straight in real life. Oh, and watch this site... In the next few days I'll be posting some new features we've been working on, which I'm sure you'll like.
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