System.Nerd.John.Blog

Microsoft showed us Photosynth while we were touring the MTC in downtown Chicago a few months ago.  Photosynth is an impressive new Silverlight-based technology they’ve been working on that can be used to stitch hundreds of images together into a single explorable, zoomable, pannable, and web-viewable panoramic image.   I was looking for a situation where I could possibly make use of Photosynth since I first saw it.   The amazing panaromic views of Isle Royale National Park in Michigan proved to be the perfect opportunity.

The photosynths are easy to make – just stand in one place, turn in a circle and take about 50-100 overlapping pictures.  Be sure to zoom in a few times and take some detail shots.  After downloading the Photosynth client and selecting photos to stitch, some pre-processing takes place on your computer and the images are uploaded to the Photosynth website where the final combined result can be viewed.  The resulting photosynth can be embedded in a web page.

You can see an example from Isle Royale below.  Give it a few seconds to load for a better experience while zooming around.  Use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out, and drag the picture around to pan.