Photosynth
Inspired by Steve Clayton’s blog on the subject, I’ve been playing with Photosynth from the Microsoft Live Labs. It’s a very cool tool which generates flowing 3d images from a series of flat shots. Almost impossible to describe, it’s well worth an explore. Aside from digital tourism, I can see plenty of applications including collectors , buyers and sellers. Imagine offering one of these 3d tours of your wonderful merchandise on eBay.
For my first attempt, I took about 80 shots of one of my guitars (what else). The finished effect – photographic quality aside – is very impressive. I can see where I missed taking some critical "linkage" shots which would have rendered an even more impressive 3d tour. You will also see that I perhaps should have righted the portrait angle shots before uploading them. Imagine what a decent photographer could achieve with this.
http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=80e01f38-0eec-427c-b259-ea437618e8aa