More Photosynth Exploration

I've continued my exploration of Photosynth - we have a school fair coming up and a number of art works are going up for auction. I took a number of shots of these today (even though the sunlight was not cooperating as you'll see from the top left of each picture) and uploaded the photos to the Photosynth engine. The result is below. (I have focussed on two of the paintings - the one in the centre (the large one) and the one immdiately to it's left as you look - so you should be able to see more detail of these as you zoom in.)

Just use the Photosynth navigation tools or your mouse and zoom-wheel to explore the images.

I'm pretty happy with the job Photosynth does and I'm learning that quantity of photos is good - have at least 50% overlap of images seems to be a good idea. Now knowing that lots of photos is good, overlap is good, and a few other things from the nice and short, but useful Photosynth guide, I need to find my way out onto a few field trips with some classes and see what we can do ...

To get an idea of just how way cool Photosynth can be if you know a bit about it before you begin taking your photos (and you have a nice day!) - try out these two ...



and the Grand Canal in Venice.

Aviary - my find of the year?

I'm on a bit of a crusade at the moment to see what open source or web 2.0 options exist for a wide range of applications that we use at school. Now, apart from the likes of the standard OpenOffice or Google Docs, more "exotic" options for video editing, photo editing and audio creation online have been varied in quality- and in the case of video editing the landscape has changed a lot this past year. Today I ended up at Aviary via a tweet from someone (it's alzheimers I tell you). While it doesn't boast video editing, the rest of the suite looks awesome.

Here's the intro video from their main site

...and this is the one that caught my eye from their new audio tool, Myna




I'll be using these tools with my Year 8 Digital Technologies class in Term 4 - that'll give me an idea of how they perform over a wireless network and how 12 and 13 year olds respond to this software.

But if it works half as well as the demo's suggest - we'll have a ball. It looks a cool tool.