Photosynths — pros, cons and how to do them

A year and a half ago, Microsoft Live Labs released an interesting interactive multimedia experience called Photosynth. It’s basically a 3d-ish environment created from hundreds of photos. You can zoom in, out, view different angles and details of the photosynth environment you create. Microsoft has detailed instructions on how to shoot and create a Photosynth on their site which is very helpful.

Here’s a handful of recently produced Photosynth examples (in their publication order):

• National Geographic’s historical landmarks
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sue the T-Rex Photosynth
• CNN’s “The Moment”
• Inauguration Photosynths Mapped by Microsoft
  
• Washington Post Lincoln Memorial | Air & Space Museum | American Indian Museum

I’d been jonesin’ to try this new technology out after I saw National Geographic’s experiment with it in 2008. So at the Post-Dispatch, we created a photosynth of Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex (an exhibit at the local science center) in the beginning of 2009. Our multimedia intern, Ryan Gladstone, shot hundreds of photos of Sue at multiple angles in the Science Center and Brian Williamson, Erica Smith and Gary Hairlson helped stuff it into the Internet and skin it to our site (as well as offer an example to Mac users who can’t view Photosynths).

Having gone through the exercise now (and having seen a few others follow in our footsteps), here are some thoughts about the technology, it’s benefits and it’s limitations:

+ Innovative experience
It’s gotta be said. When this technology works, it’s really, really cool. Photosynths are a great interactive experience to explore a place/event/thing. I think anyone who saw the Blaise Aguera y Arcas Seadragon demo from TED had their mind blown. (I just watched the original demo again and I’m still excited about this idea — especially the ability to have almost inifinite zoom in visual experiences.)

- Low penetration
Unfortunately, barely anyone has the Photosynth plugin installed on their computer. So your users are going to have to download a sizable plugin to view any content you create.

- Only PC & Intel Macs
The other major, major (!) technical issue, is Photosynth is only built for PCs and Intel Macs. So straight away you wipe out a sizable chunk of your audience. I’m really not a fan of this at all, so I doubt we’ll do many more of these until that issue is fixed or until we can find a workaround/solution. It was a nice experiment but not something I’d want to subject an audience to regularly.

- Image Quality
The download time for the image quality is a bad proposition. Since Photosynths are a high-bandwidth challenge, images are compressed substantially. Part of me thinks I’d rather just have a Boston.com Big Picture experience with just huge, beautiful, sharp, clean pictures than a grainy, small, 3d-ish expereince. It’s early though, bandwidth and the compression technology will improve.

- Graying reality
Photosynths can raise ethical issues among photojournalists. Unless you are shooting an inactive object or have hundreds of cameras simultaneously set up to actuate at the same moment, you’re going to get a whole lot of ‘gray area’ for what happened at *that* moment. A good example of this is CNN’s “The Moment”, if you poke around you’ll see multiple versions of Barack, some smiling, some not, some with his hand raised, some not. So photosynths can create a blurred or grayed example of reality, which can be a bit slippery if you’re billing something as an exact moment in time.

- Navigation
As with any new technology, it can take some time to figure out the Photosynth navigation interface and how users are supposed to interact with the content. It really relies on the user to be curious and persistent. (I wouldn’t want to unleash this on any of my elders because of this.)

+ Collaborative media potential
What is also really exciting about Photosynths is the opportunity to create collaborative multimedia experiences with your audience — and imagine mixing video clips into this too!

So overall, Photosynths are interesting, but there are some large technical, navigation and software penetration issues to resolve before this becomes any sort of ‘mainstream’ multimedia expereince. It’s an exciting development though and the immersive deep-zooming technology could definitely become a fixture in our lives very soon. In some senses, the multi-touch experiences on iPhones parallel the Photosynth navigaton experience.