A month or two ago I was signed up as an alpha tester for Popfly. I've finally found the time to have a play with it. Popfly is an online tool that's used to build and share gadgets, mashups, applications, and Web pages. In essence a mashup is a web application that combines the functionality of two or more web sites.
It’s power lies in the fact that it allows non-developers to create web applications without having to learn to code, and allows developers to extend it using an SDK for Visual Studio. It was but the work of two minutes to create a mashup that got images from the Live Image Search website and animate them on a rotating sphere. Another few minutes work produced a mashup that got Twitter posts and displayed them on a virtual Earth.
Popfly is built using Silverlight. More on that another time.
Monday, 20 August 2007
PhotoSynth
I've just found a nice tool at Microsoft Live Labs. It's called PhotoSynth and allows you to upload a collection of photos of a place, which then get analysed, and displayed in a reconstructed 3D space, allowing you to explore the scene from any angle. Check out the collections for a demo.
It's an impressive tool as, as anyone who has a background in computer vision will know, image registration is a non-trivial problem. If only it were available as a desktop application...
It's an impressive tool as, as anyone who has a background in computer vision will know, image registration is a non-trivial problem. If only it were available as a desktop application...
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