Microsoft demos mind-bending photo app
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Puts Google to shame If you haven't seen the demo, see it now. In March, at the annual Technology, Education, Design (TED) conference in Monterrey, California, Microsoft Live Labs took the wraps off a mind-bending digital photo app called Seadragon, and you can now stream a video of this not-to-be-missed demo from the TED website. Coupled with Photosynth, another project in the works at Live Labs, Seadragon could take Google's much-discussed StreetView idea to a whole new level.â¦
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Join the crowd: Step up from a digital point-and-shoot to a more powerful, more affordable digital SLR.
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Ahem... It's a tricky one: you've developed some software for "showing and managing digital pictures and 3D Objects with a simple, intuitive, and complete interface", but now it's time to give it a snappy, eye-catching name guaranteed to attract all the right sort of attention.â¦
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New game platform apparently can respond to emotions and conscious thoughts to move objects on the screen.
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A specialized camera regularly takes pictures to aid with memory.
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(InfoWorld) - MicrosoftÂ is working on a variety of innovative photo projects, ranging from experiments with its 3D maps offering to massive panoramic photos that users can zoom into for details. Developers who work in the company's research arm showed off the technologies on Tuesday during the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit in Redmond, Washington. HD View is one photo project that definitely has the "wow" factor. The technology allows users to combine hundreds of photos to create one massive picture that users can zoom in on to see clear details. In one example, a panoramic photo of the city of Seattle includes 800 images, each 8 megapixals in size, stitched together to create a 3.6 billion-pixel image. On a computer screen, it looks just like a panoramic photo. So, what's the point of combining so many photos? The massive file includes incredible detail. Michael Cohen, a researcher at Microsoft working on the project, zoomed in to the roof of a building where a clay owl peers around a corner. With the picture zoomed out, a viewer doesn't even see a pin prick in the spot where the owl sits. Another large photo of a mountain in Canada looks like a standard nature snapshot. But Cohen zoomed in to discover that climbers are scaling the rock wall. After finding the first climber, he followed the climbing ropes up to find the second one above him on the wall. When the photo is zoomed out, it's hard to imagine there might be climbers on the wall. Microsoft offers the tool to build HD View photos for free on its Web site. Creating an HD View panorama image, however, isn't for just anyone. Such images are quite large and may require special cameras. Another Microsoft project, unveiled last year and built in collaboration with the University of Washington, collects images of a site such as Rome's Trevi fountain from public photo-sharing Web pages such as Flickr. The Photo Tourism technology combines the photos into a 3D image so users can look at the object from any view. The idea was to take advantage of the potentially billions of images that are online, said Noah Snavely, a researcher at the University of Washington who works on the project with Microsoft researchers. Microsoft also demonstrated at the summit some experiments with Virtual Earth. Eyal Ofek, a Microsoft researcher, demonstrated a 3D map of San Francisco that is made up of 10 million images, including 50,000 aerial photographs as well as pictures taken at street level. All the photos are stitched together so a user can navigate from a bird's-eye view seamlessly down to street level. The view is different from the street view capability in Google Maps, which doesn't combine the street-level pictures with aerial shots. About 800 workers are developing projects at Microsoft Research. Some technologies they develop may become commercial Microsoft products, and others could be sold to other companies. The summit, which ended Tuesday, was an opportunity for Microsoft and its partners in academia to show off some of their projects.
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Stop milking same old cow Advice from Microsoft on designing useful and uncomplicated software? Now, there's a novel idea.â¦
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Photo flash memory leader focuses on the masses.
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... It's with much anticipation that I say this. I have a new product that may be familiar to those of you who used Radio 8, and in other ways may be completely new.  The idea is simple.  There's a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity. The purpose of this product is to smooth that convergence, to make it easy to set up a connection between the Internet and your television. To allow photography to come into your living room in new, powerful and easy ways. Think of it as the networked living room and you'll understand the vision. Some of the work I've done is technical, some is user interface, and some is working with media organizations to try to create a comfort level, or at least a spirit of Let's Give This A Try. In the latter case, it's much like working with the NY Times to get their news headlines and summaries to flow through Radio's RSS aggregator in 2002. Only this time we're working with photographs, and we think, the best news photographers in the world. And the pictures are beautifully high-def, they look really great when displayed on LCD and plasma screens. I use it with my 52-inch Samsung and 46-inch Sony. Of course what looks great on a wall, also looks great on a 15-inch Macbook or 24-inch iMac.   And while we connect those pros with your TV, it's equally important that we connect your friends and families too. One of the early testers found the pictures that Doc Searls uploads to Flickr a great revelation. Me too. That's because Doc is not only a great photographer, he's also a great story-teller. I find that I can follow the lives of far more friends visually than I can through text messages (which I love to do too!). Viewing great photos on bigscreen TVs, desktops and laptops -- that's one focus, but not the only one.  I wanted to provide a complete two-way tool for people who love Flickr, as I do.  Why Flickr? Well, they've got this great thing called an API. It makes it possible for people like me to make software that runs on a desktop computer that does things like automatically backing up your new photos every night, and providing a drop-folder on your desktop for quick uploads. (It understands tags too, it's incredibly simple.) We also made it easy to post pictures you like to Twitter. Why Twitter? It's that API thing again. They made it easy for us to love them. I wish more network service developers understood how powerful this outstretched hand is.  But that's not all! Not by a long shot. The reason all this will be so familiar to Radio 8 users is that it builds on the same engine, the one that was released as open source in 2004. So I've been working on other tools to drop into this base platform and once we have a good-sized base of people using it for "really simple photos" on the desktop, there will be other tools. And because it's an open platform, other developers can do the same. Not saying they will, but they can.  Anyway, I'm in the last stages, preparing the download site, and a FAQ, and tweaking the installer. One caveat, the first beta release is Mac only. That's because I'm doing all my work on the Mac, and this is a one-man show. Later we will work it out for Windows too, and with a bit more work and a bit more luck, for Linux.  It should be ready before the sun goes down today.
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Microsoft is aiming to offer a higher-quality alternative to JPEG, saying Thursday that it planned to standardize its HD Photo graphics format. The new format is said to offer better quality, less data loss, and advanced functionality.
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Take a photo tour of mankind's most ambitious physics experiment ever.
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Device can improve the image quality of standard and high-definition images.
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Digital photo frames expand beyond standalone frames into home appliances.
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Version 2 of the free image-editing app enhances organizational, sharing features.
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iPhone UI clone CES on Video Bill Gates demos Surface, Microsoft's multi-touch finger-controlled UI that sports some rather iPhone-like gesture controls...â¦
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Take a closer look at the four apps -- Expression Web, Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Blend -- that make up Microsoft's new design suite.
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Adobe says high dynamic range photography and panorama creation are in Lightroom's purview. Also: why the software development kit isn't as easy as you might think.