Blaise Aguera y Arcas's dashboard

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on December 26, 2008 22:16 to the question "Is Blaise the best programmer ever?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Will, you're a sweetie, but have a better claim on that title yourself. I can proudly take responsibility for some prototyping and the halo algorithm-- the rest of Photosynth was written by the excellent team :)

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on November 30, 2008 21:50 to the question "When will a Mac version of Photosynth be available?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Yours Sincerely, your wish will be granted very soon. I'm sorry not to be able to give you a date-- we don't announce dates, for a variety of good reasons-- but very, very soon.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on November 20, 2008 21:32 to the idea "Link to current view" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Try the envelope ('share') button under the synth caption. This link can be emailed or saved in your faves and will bring you (or a friend) back to the same synth, same image, same view.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on October 22, 2008 07:18 to the question "will a photosynth "offline" version be released ?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Fduch, we'd love to have a look at what you've done! (Don't worry, we're very unlikely to find what you've done objectionable!)

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on September 23, 2008 06:59 to the discussion "Why is this not supported by Mac OS Leopard?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

iansilv, we want this to work on the Mac. We're hard at work on it. Your comment about there being 'no reason' isn't entirely accurate. The difference between firefox and IE is just in the wrapper around the plugin (FF plugin vs. ActiveX control). The guts of the viewer are identical, which is why we were able to ship with Firefox support from day 1. This isn't the case between PC and Mac. The Mac uses OpenGL for 3D graphics, which is a radically different API than DirectX, which the PC uses. In other words, major parts of the viewer app need to be rewritten to run on the Mac. This isn't just web code! If we had had the manpower, we would have developed both versions simultaneously, but we didn't. I feel your pain, and know this doesn't help your frustration, but you should realize that making the choice to do our intial release PC-only was frustrating for us too. We're not happy about excluding potential fans from the experience.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas set one of Blaise Aguera y Arcas' replies as an official response to "How do I add a description or enable comments to my photosynth?" in Microsoft Live Labs

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on September 08, 2008 04:28 to the question "How do I add a description or enable comments to my photosynth?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Yes, as Luke writes, the synth description, tags and comments are all editable on the web page, when you're viewing the synth, though you have to be signed in. (We also added a tags field to the synther itself to encourage people to add tags right away, but we didn't do this for synth description.) You can comment on anyone's synth when you're signed in, but only the synth's author can add/remove tags and edit the description. For the time being at least we want all text to be attributable to a user, so we're not allowing anonymous comments.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas set one of Blaise Aguera y Arcas' replies as an official response to "Displaying, Reporting, and Searching on Halos" in Microsoft Live Labs

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on September 04, 2008 00:09 to the idea "Displaying, Reporting, and Searching on Halos" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Yes, there's clearly a need to make halos and panoramas in a synth much more discoverable. We're on it!

Blaise Aguera y Arcas started following the idea "Displaying, Reporting, and Searching on Halos" in Microsoft Live Labs.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on September 03, 2008 04:25 to the question "Flickr-pool-based dynamic synths" in Microsoft Live Labs:

To me this actually looks like two feature ideas: first, a collective synth that builds up over time, and second, a connection or feed of images from a Flickr pool. Both are interesting ideas. There are some not-so-trivial aspects, however, like 1) if we start synthing on the server, this probably isn't the application to begin with, 2) if on the client, whose and when, 3) new synther work needed to not continually redo calculations, 4) synths can get really big this way, unless there's some added intelligence to weed out superfluous images or segment the results. I think we'll get there, but there are some simpler scenarios that will exercise subsets of this kind of functionality first.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 31, 2008 15:57 to the question "What is the relationship between Photosynth and Photo Tourism?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Yes, these are all great features. I wish they were already in there! For the next little while, we'll mostly be prioritizing community features over fancier visuals. Path planning and my-photos-in-context are high on the list, though.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas set one of Blaise Aguera y Arcas' replies as an official response to "Getting Photosynth updates" in Microsoft Live Labs

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 30, 2008 21:20 to the question "Getting Photosynth updates" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Tradewind, the 8/28 update is web code only, so you get it whether you like it or not :). We are of course hard at work on updates to the binaries as well, but we're not going to be able to issue those with the same frequency as we refresh the web code.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas started following the idea "My Favourite Synths!" in Microsoft Live Labs.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 29, 2008 06:51 to the idea "Specify that only a subset of images appear in the displayed synth" in Microsoft Live Labs:

I also think this is a great idea.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas started following the idea "Specify that only a subset of images appear in the displayed synth" in Microsoft Live Labs.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas set one of Blaise Aguera y Arcas' replies as an official response to "IE8 Beta 2" in Microsoft Live Labs

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 29, 2008 06:46 to the question "IE8 Beta 2" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Tradewind, tonight we updated the site, and it should now work. Let us know if there are any remaining issues under IE8.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas shared an idea in Microsoft Live Labs on August 28, 2008 08:07:

Pointcloud exporter!

Peter (on the Photosynth team) ran across the following wonderful piece of work: http://binarymillenium.blogspot.com/2...
A number of you have asked about getting pointclouds out of Photosynth, and the clever binarymillenium has reverse-engineered how to parse it out! We should make the following caveats: a) binarymillenium isn't connected with Microsoft in any way (as far as we know :), and b) the format isn't yet documented or supported (we're working on it), so we can't yet guarantee that it'll be stable. But I'm sure there will be readers eager to try this out. (Binarymillenium, I hope you don't mind our reposting your screenshot!)