My First Attempt at Microsoft Photosynth

We were on our property on Pender Island again this morning, meeting with our architect and builder. While they staked out the precise location of the house, garage and the walkway between the two, I snapped 160 photos from, roughly speaking, where my future office will be located. I then used Microsoft’s new Photosynth project to magically stitch them together. You have to have Photosynth installed (Windows only, I’m afraid) to view the, uh, thingie (which I removed from my page, as it was causing some dogdiness).

I have mixed feelings about the results. To be honest, I read almost nothing in the way of tips or best practices before I started, and snapped the photos in a pretty haphazard fashion. You can get a reasonable sense of panorama, but I’d prefer it to feel more seamless. Maybe I’ll try another one in six or eight months when we’re (assuming the stars align) in the construction process. It also took about an hour to ‘render’ on my old Windows PC.

I don’t want to force anybody to install Photosynth, so I made a quick 40-second screencast of my Photosynth in action. I’m uploading it now, and will embed it once Vimeo finishes munching on it.

UPDATE: Here’s the video (there’s no audio):

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1674834&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
A Quick Screencast of My First Photosynth from Darren Barefoot on Vimeo.