Saturday, July 21, 2007

PhotoSynth, Seadragon, BeOS and Jef Raskin's THE

My friend James pointed to TED demo of seadragon/photosynth.

Think of it as a two part thing

  • Seadragon is a rendering engine for images, which is really fast and only needs as much memory as your screen resolution needs

  • PhotoSynth is automatic linking of images to make 3D models



Go and watch the demo if you have no idea what I just said.

There's a live demo too.

The interaction with SeaDragon reminded me of Jef Raskin's zooming user interface (8mb swf)

Pretty sweet.

I always wanted to build something like it, after playing with a photo+wireframing tool (It was like a poor man's google sketchup) when I was about 13. You'd get an image, draw a cube, and texture it, get another image, texture, hey presto, easy digital model. Unfortunately, adobe bought it and snuffed it, and I have no freakin' idea on how to build something like they have.

The performance of SeaDragon reminded me of a BeOS demo video - a lot of things going one at once.

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