20 January 2009

Photosynth + Multitouch = an astonishing look at the oath of office

Photosynth on Multitouch, uploaded by TED Conference.

On CNN's Inauguration Day coverage today: a massive Photosynth of the precise moment that President Barack Obama took the oath of office. In the image above, an anchor sifts through individual images on a Multitouch screen. We're proud because both these technologies -- Photosynth and the Multitouch screen -- were demo'd first at TED.

Watch Jeff Han demo his Multitouch screen at TED2006 >>

Watch Blaise Aguera y Arcas demo Seadragon/Photosynth at TED2007 >>

(And yes, you can view this Photosynth on a Mac. Click on the link to CNN's The Moment, and follow the instructions to download Silverlight for your Mac or freeware box.)

Photo: William Allen

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19 January 2009

Photosynth Obama's inauguration (update)

Via ReadWriteWeb: CNN.com's minisite "The Moment" will be Synthing the inauguration on January 20, combining crowd snapshots of this historic Tuesday into an immersive experience:

"We'll take your photos from every angle, combine them with CNN's professional shots, and produce what we hope will be an amazing experience that will be shown live on CNN. And you thought the Jessica Yellin hologram was cool! The synth will also be available for everyone to see on CNN.com."

Meanwhile, MSNBC used Photosynth to capture Sunday's Lincoln Memorial concert on the Mall:

Correction: This does indeed work on a Mac and other platforms (you may have to install Silverlight). Thanks, Michael H!

And if you're wondering, What's Photosynth? -- then watch this:

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30 May 2007

Three powerful talks from TED2007

This week we're posting three of the most-talked-about talks from TED2007 -- Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, John Doerr and Blaise Aguera y Arcas' remarkable demo of Seadragon/Microsoft Photosynth.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the former Finance Minister for Nigeria (and the first woman to hold that job), argues for investment -- rather than aid -- as the means to help Africa. Okonjo-Iweala will also speak at next week's TEDGlobal conference in Arusha, Tanzania. John Doerr, legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, has turned his investment focus from high tech to greentech -- because his daughter asked him to. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, software architect for Microsoft and architect of Seadragon, put Microsoft's jaw-dropping Photosynth software through its paces in a demo that had TED2007 abuzz. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, CA.)

NEW: Read the transcripts >>

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09 March 2007

TED2007 Day Two: things that knocked my hat in the creek

Oh boy, Day Two of TED2007 was so full of interesting stuff that it bled in to Day Three, which is why I find myself here at 4am in the morning writing this blog post.  Again, I'll make no attempt to talk about everything (see Bruno's posts for that point of view), just a few things which stuck out for me.

Day Two for me was, above all, a day of vivid imagery.

John Maeda gave an elegant talk via a stream of beautiful images covering everything from a life responsibility curve to good tofu to cheese puff drawing tools to sushi.  He showed us everything we ever needed to know about simplicity with just two photos of cookies, one small and one large, and two photos of piles of laundry, one small and one large.  You want the large cookie but the small laundry pile, and that's simplicity in a nutshell.

Microsoft brought us some amazing demos, including one of Photosynth, which synthesizes a scalable image based on a search of flickr for all images of a specific subject, such as the cathedral of Notre Dame (photo credit Jurvetson):

Theo Jansen showed us videos of his wind-driven walking creatures, and also had an actual working machine/artificial animal walking across the stage -- effortlessly stepping to create, in effect, a virtual wheel.  Here's a photo, but also be sure to see the video here:

2007 TEDPrize winner James Nachtwey's haunting images reminded us all how much needs to be done in the world.  And how lucky all of us in the TED community (which means YOU!) are to be in life circumstances which allow us to dream.  In the midst of so much talent, drive, imagination, as well as the wealth which results from the confluence of those three factors, it's easy to forget that this mode of existence is a far, far cry from the reality of so many citizens of our planet.  We heard many macro- and micro-economic statistics today.  But no statistics trying to describe life a less than a dollar a day can compete with Nachtwey's imagery of people's bodies wasting away from starvation.  See a few of them in this video:

A day of vivid imagery, indeed.

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