No, it’s not a Google horror story. Well, maybe not… but MicroSoft is sure pulling a biggie with their announcement of a new product they’re working on called Photosynth, based on SeaDragon technology.
It WILL revolutionize the way we see the web. Literally. As best as I can understand from seeing the demo video, the system reads pixels from images that have the same subject in them, and overlays them to create ‘3-dimensionable’ images, map overlays, layered renderings, and apparently, much more.
From the Photosynth demo site:
“…takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.”
They actually offer a preview demo of the technology that requires a 5.5Mb download to view. It was so mind-blowing, I wish there were time machines because I can’t wait for the future to arrive so I can use this NOW. I was SHOCKED while I was using this. The implications are mind bending, but we’ll talk about that in a second. Before you download the demo, get a bit of a background by watching a public demo at a TEDtalks convention.
Watch the video, you’ll go - WOW, at least once. Try the zoom feature - the detail is incredible.
So What? Where’s the SEO Factor?
What do you mean, so what? Think about it. They are taking images from Flickr (public domain images, no doubt) and creating an overlay of a SUBJECT. That means, with some newfangling of their API, you’ll be able to put together whole topical imaged based information presentations, or packets. Think of it like this (using the example of the ‘clock tower square’ in the demo)… if you were doing a project about that tower, you could interconnect every image that is available and create a story so large to include all aspects of all the images - that the story would never end. And that’s just with the clock tower example!
So, here’s the SEO factor: This opens a whole new field and context for optimizing websites. As an SEO pro, I have to now know how to optimize all the images that were ever used on every site I ever built so that they can be indexed into this new system, and found by users who want my images, just like they want my textual information today. Searches will be refined down to the PIXELS included in each image. What I mean is, what if my image of the tower happens to have a few pixels in it that represent a Kodak camera - I have to now optimize my meta data (in whatever form they create) to be able to be found by the futuristic new search engine that handles all this stuff - so the user can integrate my version of the kodak camera into their imagemash.
Think of 1000’s of super-hi-res images being taken of your body, then reconstructed as a 3D ’searchable’ representation…
This thing is freaky. It’s like, you could ceate a holodeck if you had enough images. Check out the Photosynth blog to stay tuned on the latest alterations of our reality.
Remember the internet 5 years ago… who was ‘Google’?
← Add Your Comment
Spread The Link Love, Baby...If you found this page useful, please link to it. Simply copy and paste the page URL or the code below into your website or blog. It will look like this:
NEWSFLASH: MicroSoft Alters Future of Everything
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
