It was likely making fun of CNN’s use of Photosynth during the inauguration. It’s worth checking out.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2009/44.president/inauguration/themoment/

“While the article is obviously in jest, I wonder how far away we are from the day where all of our lives will be recorded in digital form giving us the option to virtually replay personal events from different perspectives and to create different outcomes.”

Oh, you kid!

Is this article necessary at all?

Yeahno. That was a rhetorical question.

OT:

“…..Photosynth”

About 4 years ago I met a realtor who had that technology. He knew someone at a local univeristy who gave him the app. He could take various pictures of a place with a regular digital camera and the app would stitch all the images together.

yeah this will probably happen but only to intresting people.

Gerard:

that’s not really the same thing.

what you’re talking about is just a Quicktime VR….you set a camera up in the middle of a room, take shots from a few different angles and the software stitches them together to make a 360 panorama.

Photosynth takes pictures from different sources (in the case of CNN, they were uploaded by thousands of different people), different angles, different lighting conditions, different perspectives, etc. and figures out how to stitch them all together to make a (pretty impressive) pseudo-3D environment.

I love to relive hour upon hour of blog reading.

Of course what they fail to mention is that it always doesn’t work and you need animators to fix a lot of it. Just like Polar Express and Beowulf.

Dr Jones,
No. This wasn’t a qt VR.
These were just regular shots from a regular digital camera and the app would stitch them together in a still.
Indeed it may not be really the same thing as photosynth is but that’s what it was (what I describe).
I have seen the camera (and opened houses for shoots) used by companies by such as seevirtual360 and that wasn’t it. They have a tripod and a special automated digital camera that slowly “pans”.