Blaise Aguera y Arcas:Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo
Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a software architect for Microsoft, briefly talks us through the incredible imaging software he has developed28/01/2009 | By TED
The New Economy looks at Blaise Aguera y Arcas' brilliant vision of multi-faceted environments generated from databases of photo locations, as well as re-thinking the age old problem of desktop real-estate.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads a dazzling demo of Photosynth, software that could transform the way we look at digital images. Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth, a monumental piece of software capable of assembling static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas' background is as multidimensional as the visions he helps create. In the 1990s, he authored patents on both video compression and 3D visualization techniques, and in 2001, he made an influential computational discovery that cast doubt on Gutenberg's role as the father of movable type.
He also created Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft in 2006), the visualization technology that gives Photosynth its amazingly smooth digital rendering and zoom capabilities. Photosynth itself is a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space. This seamless patchwork of images can be viewed via multiple angles and magnifications, allowing us to look around corners or "fly" in for a (much) closer look.
Simply put, it could utterly transform the way we experience digital images.
"Perhaps the most amazing demo I've seen this year."
Ethan Zuckerman, TED attendee and Global Voices blogger
