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Talkr: Letting blogs speak for themselves.
Sep
3
Seadragon and Photosynth - the next evolution of user interaction?
September 3, 2007 |
Over the years I have worked with some amazing new technologies. But s
till every once and a while I see something and go “WOW!!” something you know could change the way we use computers. Some examples of these are wireless internet, tabbed browsing, AJAX, and a big one for me personally was Intellitxt in development environments (I simply couldn’t go back to not having it). Well I just did that less than an hour ago. Kevin MacNeil from CIMS at Carleton sent me a link to Bill St. Arnaud’s blog where he touches on a presentation at TED of SeaDragon and Photosynth. I have been waiting for interfaces to evolve from the display and scroll interface we have used for 14 years or more now. My jaw dropped - after looking around I know this has been out there floating around for a while but this is the first time I have seen it and I am more than impressed.
You can install the plug-in (which works in both IE and FireFox) and look at the sample http://labs.live.com/photosynth/SystemCheck.htm - note for me the installer took upwards of a minute to complete but it is worth the wait.There are several Collections (different views/starting points) all of which seem amazing from an initial look. A few that really show off some of the capabilities/possibilities are:
- Grassi Lakes - more amazing because I have been there - look for the people mountain climbing.
- Faigin Gallery - interesting perspective of an indoor space where you can move along from room to room.
In the video they touch on how this could be used - as a desktop browser for documents or as a browser based tool for websites with large amounts of content eg. Newspaper or obvious example map based drilling.
Some things which come to mind with Photosynth are that the next step to this has to be when you have stills (say from youtube) build a Photosynth collection and then can play videos associated from those stills. It is not a far step from where they are but would also open up some amazing doors both from a viewing perspective as well as from an interaction and further mashup perspective. Imagine having this for your television or Media PC live to a large event like say the Olympics and being able to jump between events with perspective of where it is located. Or in a more real world item being able to scan an area for security issues or suspicious individuals by just scanning thru the stills taken and then viewing the associated video - there are a lot of possibilities here.
Really with taking a step back Seadragon/Photosynth is really imagery based tag clouds which allow you to drill through data to get different perspectives from a starting location. But how much visually cooler is this than a boring text based tag cloud?
Hmmm, imagine Photosynth and Google Streets working together with data for the most of the world!
If anyone knows of any upcoming item or if there are any upcoming around Photosynth or SeaDragon(especially SeaDragon since the details are sparse) tech previews or related I would love to know the details and please email me at ron at unknownnamespace(com) or comment below.
Update: Photosynth team has released an improved installer which will hopefully correct some of the issues that I mentioned above.
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