After playing with my first Photosynth: Create a 360 panorama using Microsoft Silverlight Photosynth, I wanted to try out how the tool would work focusing on a single object. This meant taking photographs around an object instead of taking pictures around myself.

As you can see in the above Silverlight example, compared to my previous Photosynth the feel of being in a 3d space is lost. However, the ability to zoom in and see the detail of each image is still pretty cool thanks to the Deep Zoom technology. And the ability to look around an object is still pretty smart. The tool feels like it is built to navigate around an environment instead of an object so the navigation controls don’t work as well, but you can still play the sequence in the order that you took the photos so all is not lost.

Below is another test I carried out, this time I moved the object around for each photograph instead of the camera. This didn’t work too well, as the Photosynth tool referenced the carpet as the common element instead of the object.

Next I want to test out a journey of photographs, maybe walking down a street in London would be cool.

Navigate the above example by one of the following:

• Move the mouse around until a white outline appears and click
• Use the mouse wheel or the zoom buttons to zoom in and out
• Click and drag to pan around the images
• Use the short-cut images on the right to jump to featured positions
• Use the directional tool at the bottom centre of the screen

Here is my first attempt at using Microsoft Photosynth. I have seen a few examples of Photosynth before but never got round to trying it out for myself.

Photosynth is a tool that uses Microsoft Silverlight to piece together photographs to map them in 3d space. The tool is really easy to use, once you have your photographs you upload them and the tool does the rest for you. Once your images are mapped out by the tool, you are given a Silverlight interface to add some further information if you choose. You can add tags to individual images, add a geolocation and a description.

This example involved me standing in one position and taking a series of photos by turning around to form a 360 mapping. The Photosynth tool managed to map 86% of the 31 photos I uploaded which works quite well. The tool picks up on key pixel configurations and matches them across the series of images to form the full 3d map.

As you can see my first example does not fully match up all the way around so in hindsight maybe I should have taken a few more extra pictures so the tool could complete the full 360 journey.

My next task will be to take a series of images around an object instead of from a single point.

Metia launch a Silverlight Valentines day message using Deep Zoom. Keep zooming into the heart shaped text to read the full message!