I’m off for a vacation until August so I leave you with a photo from a set I took in Montreal (that is up on Flickr: Photos from geoffreyrockwell.) This is in the Museum of Contemporary Art where they had a show De L’?âcriture [With Writing] showcasing works in their collection with a connection to writing.
Microsoft is getting a lot of buzz for their preview of Photosynth which can analyze large collections of photos of a space (like St. Marks in Venice) and then reconstruct a 3-D space by stitching the photos. The 3-D space can be used to navigate the photos. Microsoft has a preview that runs on Windows XP SP2 and Vista.
Photosynth is based on the work of U of Washington Computer Science Ph. D. student Noah Snavely and his advisors. He has a page on Photo tourism: Exploring photo collections in 3D with a cool Java demo with datasets like the Trevi Fountain.
A related Microsoft technology demonstrated at TED is Seadragon which allows smooth scaling and transition of high resolution images so you can zooming can become navigation. See Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo (video).
Thanks to Matt and others for pointing these out to me.
In an earlier blog I mentioned the IDC report, The Digital Universe, about the explosion of digital information. It was commissioned by EMC Corporation and is available free on their site, here. They also have a page on related information which includes a link to “Are You an Informationist?” and “The Inforati Files”.
The PDF of the IDC White Paper includes some interesting points:
- Between 2006 and 2010, the information added annually to the digital universe will increase more than six fold from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes.
- Three major analog to digital conversions are powering this growth – film to digital image capture, analog to digital voice, and analog to digital TV.
- Images, captured by more than 1 billion devices in the world, from digital cameras and camera phones to medical scanners and security cameras, comprise the largest component of the digital universe. They are replicated over the Internet, on
private organizational networks, by PCs and servers, in data centers, in digital TV broadcasts, and on digital projection movie screens. building automation and security migrates to IP networks, surveillance goes digital, and RFID and sensor networks
proliferate.
Is it time to rewrite “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to think about about “The Image in the Age of Networked Distribution”.
fd’s Flickr Toys is a set of utilities that work with Flickr. I like the On Black tool which creates a link that puts a Flickr picture like Shoulder on a Black Background. You can then put the link into the comments or description.
Well I got myself a Flickr account for the photos I take. I’m tired of hand coding albums.
Here is a set of photos I took on a hike in Cootes after the storm we had this week. Snow has smothered the hills so softly that everything is pushing back through.
The catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell is a collection of images of strange dark entrances (usually boarded up.) There is now a Flickr group too. Remember the safety rules:
Rule 1: It may be an obvious thing to say but NEVER try to go inside an entrance to Hell.
Rule 2: Always approach an entrance on your stomach.
Rule 3: Don’t shout at the devil (not even with good news).
Rule 4: Wear rubber gloves for 3 or 4 days after your visit.
This site came up when I googled “go to hell”.
Kite Aerial Photography is a photography site by by Scott Haefner that includes 360 degree panoramas taken from kites. Haefner is a professional photographer and site designer whose site also describes the equipment needed to kite aerial photography. The site itself, along with its companion on his Ground-based Photography, is an example of a well designed photo site. Thanks to Shawn for this.
Escape Route is a “photographic travelogue” which shows a 3D itinerary or 2D itinerary of locations for which there are photos. The itineraryies are mapped onto 3d or 2d globes space. There are neat animations for when you collapse from 3d to 2d. I’m so intrigued by the navigation interface I haven’t really looked at the snaps. Thanks to Drew Paulin for this.
ARIA is an MIT Media Lab project from the Software Agents
that can do continuous retrieval and ranking of images based on typing. To me it suggests a more humble approach to agents than the “send off and forget” type of agent discussed in the 90s. This is more the “autocorrect” type of assistant. This is from Matt Patey.
Continue reading ARIA:
The Wooster Collective: A Celebration of Street Art is a collective blog (“clog”) about street art that I got lost in. Thanks to Geoff T. for this.
Continue reading Wooster Collective