Nathanael Lawrence's dashboard

Hi, Bob!

Watching the Day 1 Keynote today?

http://live.visitmix.com/

How does summer sound to you?

Day 1 Keynote: http://live.visitmix.com/

Day 1 Keynote: http://live.visitmix.com/

You guys might want to watch the Day 1 keynote from MIX10 here:
http://live.visitmix.com/

Also... the front page of http://getpivot.com.

Poetic,

The Silverlight download site has updated this week, so you could try downloading it again.

If it doesn't work, I've copied the exact link to the installer myself, having just now downloaded it to my desktop in OSX without a problem. Right click on this link to try saving the installer's image again.

Hi, Tom.

What operating system are you using?

If you are using Windows or an Intel Mac, you can download (and install) Silverlight 3 to view synths.

If you're using Linux, Novell is working hard to reverse-engineer an open source Silverlight clone called Moonlight which should run the Photosynth viewer after Novell rebuilds enough of Silverlight 3's features (the current Photosynth viewer is a Silverlight 3 application so Moonlight 2.0 won't run it).

However, if you want to create your own synths, you'll need to be running Windows and download the Photosynth synther.

After you install the synther, making a synth is as easy as:

1) Make sure that you have a Photosynth account.
-- Sign in to Photosynth.net with your Windows Live ID and pick a Photosynth username. Don't mis-spell your username because it will be attached to that email address forever.
-- If you already have an @msn.com, @live.com, or @hotmail.com email address, that is your Windows Live ID and you should use that address and password to sign in to the photosynth website.
-- If you don't have a Microsoft email address from those sites and don't want one, you can use your current email address to sign up for a Windows Live ID.

2) Open the synther.
(You can do this by clicking 'Photosynth' on your Windows Start Menu or by visiting the 'Create' page on Photosynth.net.)

3) Sign in to the synther with the same Windows Live ID that you used on the Photosynth site.

4) Drag a minimum of three photos of a stationary scene or object into the synther.

5) Type a title for your synth in the upper right corner of the synther.

6) Click the [Synth] button.

After your photos are automatically converted, uploaded, and matched by the synther, it will provide you with a link to your new synth so that you (and others, if you made your synth public) can view it online.

Whenever you are signed in to the Photosynth site, you can see your synths by clicking your name at the top of the site.

What web browser are you using to download the DMG, Poetic? – Nathanael Lawrence, on March 10, 2010 06:06

Thanks, Melinda. It does seem likely that it is happening in the DZI generation process, but I don't have any way to confirm that.

In any case, this case seems to have been resolved once the images were confirmed to have been tagged, thus changing their hash and allowing fresh copies to be uploaded. – Nathanael Lawrence, on March 10, 2010 00:38

Not without doing some conversion first. Even then, I'm not entirely sure whether you can tag things to organise them further after the collection was constructed.

What exactly did you have in mind? Were you thinking of seeing each page of a PDF in Pivot or only the front page of each while you sorted them?

1) Seadragon AJAX doesn't publicly support Deep Zoom Collections (yet) - only individual Deep Zoom Images.

2) The amount of animation happening in Pivot would be very hard to get to run fast enough with Javascript, I think.

Hey, guys, you can try the Moonlight 3 alpha, if you like. (Considering that it's alpha quality, though, and that no posts have been made from the Moonlight guys saying that Photosynths now work, don't hold your breath.)

As I linked to above, the Moonlight team is prioritizing their work on whatever will get the major Silverlight apps up first and the Photosynth viewer is on that list.

For more news, I'd recommend keeping an eye out for Moonlight 3 and 4 posts on Miguel de Icaza's blog.

As I've noted elsewhere, having Moonlight running the Photosynth viewer correctly still only lets you view synths. Making them is only achieved via the standalone synther app which only runs under Windows.

If you'd like to use Noah Snavely's Bundler, which is GPL licensed Linux code, you can download it for free. It hasn't undergone the optimizations that the Photosynth synther has, nor does it output data in Photosynth's format (to my knowledge), but it will run where you want it to. The other downside is that I don't think that the University of Washington makes their Photo Tourism viewer available, so viewing the results is up to you to figure out. Check out Binary Millenium's Bundler post that I link to below to get a heads up.

On a different tangent, and in the spirit of open source, you could look into getting the Linux community to build your own Photosynth viewer that loads synths from the official Photosynth site. Both the co-ordinate data and the multiscale image formats are fairly well understood.

In fact the iSynth app for the iPhone and iPod Touch doesn't use Silverlight or Direct3D as both of the official Photosynth viewers have.

For more information on the coordinate data, see Christoph Hausner's Photosynth Pointcloud Exporter as well as Binary Millenium's blog posts about Bundler and Photosynth pointclouds.

For information on how Deep Zoom images work, you can reference the Developer section at Seadragon.com, this MSDN article, or this blog post on the Deep Zoom Blog.

For a head start on building your own tool that generates Deep Zoom Images and Collections, see this list of third party tools.

For how to build your own Deep Zoom Image viewer, look up Daniel Gasienica's OpenZoom viewer, which is open source and already reads DZIs. For that matter, you can also see what the Seadragon team themselves did with Seadragon AJAX and use concepts learned from OpenZoom and the ASP.net version of Seadragon AJAX to build your own Deep Zoom viewer. It would be truly interesting to see the Linux community build their own OpenGL Photosynth viewer.

As a random bonus, here are API links relating to: the webservice that the official synther uses and Javascript calls to interact with the Photosynth viewer.