Wired Science

Snazzy New Software Gets the Whole Picture

There must be millions of amateur snapshots of the Grand Canyon floating around on the Web. What if you could link them all together into a single image of the whole place, one that you could view from any angle and zoom in on as closely as you wanted? That's what software designer Blaise Aguera y Arcas' latest brainchild, a program called Photosynth, does. The technology scans the Web to find huge numbers of related photographs - whether shot by a professional or snapped on a cell phone - and grafts them seamlessly together.

The result is a richly detailed mosaic of the entire tourist attraction, building or whatever you want. You can step virtually back to see the whole thing, or move in for a closer look until you're nose-to-nose with a church's gargoyle.  Just for laughs, you can also see where each picture was taken from, and view it individually. The photos can also be processed to form a three-dimensional model that you can rotate and spin around to your eyeballs' content. Potentially, says Aguera y Arcas, Photosynth can be used to create incredibly detailed models of entire areas of the world - think Google Maps, but with contributions from random civilians and ground-level detail everywhere.

Aguera y Arcas' company Seadragon, which was recently bought by Microsoft,  developed the technology that drives Photosynth. That software is hardly his first foray into advanced digital imagery. He holds patents on video compression and 3D visualization techniques. In 2001, he and a colleague discovered that Johann Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, used a less sophisticated process than had been generally assumed in creating the movable type that made the press possible. Using Aguera y Arcas' software, the pair superimposed hundreds of letters from a Gutenberg-printed books on top of each other, and discovered that were not identical. That suggests that they had to be were created from separate molds rather than a single, reusable master mold, as later became standard.

WIRED Science got an exclusive in-studio tour of Photosynth and what might be a whole new way of looking at things.