Photoshynth 3D Fun!

The most interesting thing about Photosynth is the possibility to have your images mapped in 3d space. A "classic" panorama is shot from the NPP (no parallax point) so there is no depth information available.
This changes if you're capturing stereo panoramas. They contain the needed depth information, just like the human stereoscopic view with 2 eyes.

I uploaded 2 stereo panoramas from the flak tower in Vienna to Photosynth to see if it really works ... and it did:

The scene looks best in fullscreen using the DirectX viewer !

Here is a link to the default Silverlight viewer, along with the second panorama. The most impressive views are the overhead view and the point clound zoomed out:

Flak Tower 1

Flak Tower 2

Panorama stitcher - the next generation

A new generation of the well known and (in many variations) ubiquitous Panorama Tools Stitcher is available, fittingly called "PTStitcherNG" - created by the author of the original software, Prof. Helmut Dersch.
The new application uses SIMD Maths and can delegate the calculations to a CUDA-capable GPU. My personal tests with a Nvidia GTX 260 (GT200b) revealed a speed increase of up to 24 times compared to the (also very fast) PTGui 8.3.6 stitcher!

The stitcher is still in an early beta state, so don't expect it to be feature-rich. However - integration in PTGui is already working.
PTStitcherNG is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux (x86). The most current version can be downloaded here.

Please note for version 0.4b and Windows Vista/7: At the moment there is a compile problem, so the stitcher will only run in Win95/98 compabitility mode.

Say farewell to Vienna South Train Station

What the Viennese people always liked to do is to watch a moribund dying:
On 12.12.2009 the Vienna South Train Station was opened to the public for the last time. After that day the demolishion starts to make place for the new "Vienna Central Station". Many parts of the infrastructure were already removed as well as the famous "eyes".

Hundreds of photographers (including me) took the "last picture" of this train station which was built in its present form between 1955 and 1961 by architect Heinrich Hrdlicka. With the central building he combined the already existing stations "Vienna south" and "Vienna East", which were built in the 19th century and severely damaged in WWII.

More images by Michael Hierner (derstandard.at).
You can also explore an overview of the area in high resolution as well as see the monthly progress of the construction work.

Swirl: Google Labs Image search

As usual when it comes to beta software, Swirl results can look a little messed up.
Still, it looks more promising to me than Visual Search.

"We're All Gonna Die - 100 meters of existence"

(click image to visit the artist's homepage)

A photograph by Simon Høgsberg.
As a print, this image is 100m by 78cm. As the artist states, the panorama was shot "...in the course of 20 days from the same spot on a railroad bridge on the Warschauer Strasse in Berlin".
Only a few - but definitely some - noticed that they were photographed...