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06.07.07

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly

TED Talk on Photosynth

We've already written quite a bit about photosynth, which Gary Flake first showed at last year's Web 2.0 Summit, but I hadn't seen the TED talk till this morning. Lou Barr, an O'Reilly editor who works with us on the Head First series, wrote:

This is a long(ish) video, but well worth the effort. It's stunning and draws in a lot of the user-generated content ideals that Tim's extolling right now.

Take a look, be amazed at Seadragon: Bleak House, the high res advert in the newspaper, and then the AWESOME 3D image of Notre Dame created from Flickr images.

As the blurb says: "...Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images."

Lou was right to call attention to the parallels between my description of harnessing collective intelligence as the heart of Web 2.0 and photosynth. Blaise Aguera y Arcas makes clear in his comments during the demo how photosynth is not just a graphics application but an application that gets better the more people use it, and in which the value of each contribution is enhanced by others. We're just at the beginning of understanding how collective intelligence can transform applications. We're going to see more and more breakthroughs like photosynth that don't look like web applications but nonetheless draw from the same deep trends.



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Comments: 3

Chris Fizik   [06.07.07 01:49 PM]

Oh yes ... I've been showing this all sorts of people for the last week since I've seen it ... fantastic demo .. and the technology really is mind-blowingly innovative and groundbreaking.

Jonathan Blocksom   [06.08.07 07:53 AM]

I remember a talk given by Henry Fuchs, a Computer Graphics professor at UNC, when image based 3D rendering was first hitting the scene in the mid 90s. Someone asked him about the future of rendering and he said that in ten years we'd be dealing with just points and images -- quite a statement to the polygon based culture of the time. Looks like he's only off by a factor of two.

geekr   [06.11.07 08:06 AM]

We really need affordable 3D displays to have more fun with Photosynch and other 3D applications. Check out these top 5 stunning 3D displays on my blog:
http://innowave.blogspot.com/2007/06/top-5-stunning-3d-displays.html

When do you think will they be targeted for average users?


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