Strange Duck - Tech Talk in Plain English

This video shows Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, demonstrating some amazing software that can manipulate images into the most wondrous things.

Seadragon let’s you interact with enormous amounts of megabytes, some in the 300 megapixel range. Watch him zoom in and out of a complete issue of The Guardian and be able to get right down to the tiniest detail - a bit of technical information they embedded in a car ad to showoff the power.

Photosynth takes Seadragon and melds it with computer vision research done by Noah Snavely, with Steven M. Seitz, and Richard Szeliski, developing software that creates breathtaking composite images from photos taken from the web.

Here Blaise presents a reconstruction of Notre Dame made entirely from pictures uploaded to Flickr, the popular photo sharing site. The three-dimensional image is composed of thousands of photos taken with a wide range of cameras - from cell phones to professional SLRs - and even a poster. Once again, you can zoom in and out from a wide angle shot to the tiniest detail of a gargoyle with Seadragon’s extraordinary navigation features.

You can explore Photosynth for yourself on the Microsoft Live Labs web site. Works only on Microsoft PCs, bien sur.

The video is a tape of Blaise’s presentation this past March at TED - the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference that’s all about ideas,and putting them into action. See more TED presentations by the brightest and most entertaining minds at TED Talks.

Tags: photosynth, seadragon, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, microsoft live labs, digital imaging, flickr