New Photosynth release

Photosynth v.2: Brady Forest over on O'Reilly Radar has a thorough post on the new release of Photosynth from MS, which (most significantly) includes the ability to create your own "Synths", all of which are shared with/hosted by the community, and which are built with heavy use of your local machine. Clever, and very exciting as far as creating views of museum objects goes. Obviously I have yet to try it out, and who knows, it might turn out to be cheaper and easier to spend a few tens of thousands on a 3D scanner instead, but somehow I doubt it.... Coolcoolcool

Fotowoosh breaks cover

IIRC, you can download the necessary code to run Fotowoosh or whatever they originally called it yourself, but who wants to do that? Now (I discover, thanks to OUseful) they have made it available through Facebook. I hope I'm not breaking any rules that I've not read about by embedding here an instance that I've made through that site. Here you go, anyway, a view of the Getty Museum with LA in the background. It's evidently not the perfect sort of photo for the job but you get the idea.

SL Van Gogh Painting

From Beth's Blog: Step into a Van Gogh Painting in Second Life.
Looks quite fun, though I haven't signed up to SL so I dunno. I was thinking about how one might be able to use the power of that new application for extracting 3D data from 2D images to interpret paintings, and at least get a head start (and better textures) for something like this. No idea how that would happen, but it has to be said that though this van Gogh reconstruction is nice and potentially useful and instructive in itself, it's pretty far from the painting.