The most impressive demonstration at Sunday's IVRPC seminar was
Photosynth from Microsoft Live Labs — a program that constructs
large-scale, 3-D models of objects like buildings from hundreds of
still photographs.
Using a mouse, viewers can walk in — and around — the 3-D
model,
looking at the object from almost any angle. Viewers can isolate
individual shots, and quickly zoom into the tiniest details with a roll
of the mouse scroll wheel.
One reconstructed scene showed the Trevi fountain in Rome, stitched
together from 350 photographs scraped from Flickr. The immersive scene
incorporated images shot with everything from cell-phone cameras to
high-end SLRs.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas is behind this development. He
is an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect
of
Seadragon, and the co-creator of
Photosynth, a monumental piece of
software capable of assembling static photos into a synergy of
zoomable, navigatable spaces.
Blaise has a broad background in computer science
and applied math, and he has been writing software for more than 20
years, with special emphasis on scientific computing, data analysis,
machine learning, and graphics. He graduated from Princeton University
with a BA in Physics in 1998, and he attended the PhD program there in
Applied Math. His advisor,
Ingrid Daubechies, known as one of the
inventors of wavelets, periodically asks when he plans to hand in the
thesis.
His experience includes independent research, consulting, and freelance
software design in a variety of areas, including computational
neuroscience, computational drug design, data compression, and others.
During 1996-97, he was Senior Software Engineer at Real-Time Geometry,
which was purchased by MetaTools (later Viewpoint.com). While at RTG
and MetaTools, he authored patents on multiresolution 3D visualization
and techniques for video compression and internet transmission using
Trixels™, as well as playing a leading role in developing
streaming
and multiresolution 2D and 3D technologies and contributing to the
hardware and software design of a 3D laser scanner.
In 2001, he
received worldwide press coverage for his discovery, using
computational methods, of the printing technology used by Johann
Gutenberg, considered the inventor of printing from movable type in the
West. This technology differs markedly from later printing
technologies, suggesting a reassessment of Gutenberg's traditional
historical role. Blaise's work on early printing was the subject of a
BBC Open University documentary entitled,
What Did Gutenberg
Invent? and a monograph on this research is (eventually)
forthcoming.
He has published essays and research papers in theoretical biology,
neuroscience, and history in The EMBO Journal, Neural Computation and
Nature.
In 2004, Blaise founded a software company originally named (rather
opaquely) Sand Codex LLC, later Seadragon, Inc., to develop ideas in
scalable architectures and user interfaces for interacting with large
volumes of visual information, potentially over a narrow-bandwidth
connection. He raised two rounds of funding, first from angel
investors, then from a Seattle-area VC, hired the initial engineering
and management team, and was the principal author of the company's IP
portfolio. Microsoft bought Seadragon at the beginning of 2006, in an
acquisition driven by Technical Fellow and Live Labs founder
Gary
Flake.
