Photosynch – greater than the sum of its parts
Photos from the Lizzie Borden murder investigation
Photosynth is the ultimate mash-up tool – a Microsoft application that creates a 3-D composite out of innumerable individual photographs that can be taken by anyone at any time with any camera device.
Photosynth was originally intended as a new and creative means of presenting photographs, what makes it technically appealing is that it can solve for the relative spatial relationships between photographs without knowing anything about the camera that took the photograph, and it does it relatively quickly. The potential for teachers of history, art, and science are extraordinary as they have the abiity to bring to their classrooms (or even create) 3-D models of a famous battle, a cathedral, or even an entire ecosystem.
Another intriguing potential use of Photsynch is forensics. Imagine if first responders, forensic technicians, and investigators had the means of combining a large number of overlapping photographs taken throughout the investigation of a crime scene.
What if, for example, old photos from the unsolved Lizzy Borden murder case were retrieved and Photosynched – would we possibly know whether Lizzy did indeed take an axe and “give her mother forty whacks and, when she saw what she had done, give her father forty-one?”
But why is there no Mac version?
