Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo of SeaDragon & Microsoft's giant touchscreen (Video)
Source: ted.com
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.More: Photosynth Technology Preview
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.
Article from: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
Microsoft's giant touchscreen
Microsoft is trying to out iPhone the iPhone. The software company, not renowned for its slick interfaces, has built a piece of equipment that will turn any flat surface into a giant touch-sensitive screen.
Michael Arrington, of the TechCrunch blog, got a sneak preview of Touchwall, due to be unveiled at Microsoft’s headquarters today. His video demonstration (above) shows off the screen's capabilities.
Users will scroll through content by caressing the surface and zoom in by sweeping their hands apart in an amplified version of the finger-pinching motion used on the Apple iPhone. Tapping on images, videos or documents embedded in the surface brings them up to full-screen size, while digital drawing tools allow users to add text and free-hand illustrations.
Read more: Microsoft's giant touchscreen
