Via Mark Evan’s discussion of Newspapers Aren’t Doomed; It’s Their Business Models, (which is huge and juicy topic all by itself, I can across this TED video demo of Seadragon and Photosynth, by Blaise Aguera y Arcas.
It is 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.
The TED Demo keeps getting more and more mind blowing. Semantic (the light “tagging” version), Social (sharing), Photographic (and other data) Meta processing. I’m imaging a visual Library (of Congress or enhanced Wikipedia), or Family Photo album.
Via the Photosynth home page you can try the Photosynth Technology Preview yourself ,on your XP or Vista pc in IR or FireFox (via the Photosynth Firefox plugin) Even cooler!