Blaise Aguera y Arcas's dashboard

A comment on the question "Issue at publishing stage" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Yes, you're right. – Blaise Aguera y Arcas, on August 27, 2008 03:22

A comment on the question "Issue at publishing stage" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Don't worry!-- the upload is indeed cached as MrPete below writes. We know it's a pain to recompute the synth, but at least you won't have to wait for a long re-upload. – Blaise Aguera y Arcas, on August 27, 2008 03:22

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 25, 2008 13:32 to the problem "Website: Tags wrapped out of visible area" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Also-- thanks for finding, bug filed.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 25, 2008 13:32 to the problem "Invalid character(s) in tag reported when extended characters are used for tag editing on web" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Martin, thanks for finding, the bug is filed.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 25, 2008 04:30 to the question "When will a Mac version of Photosynth be available?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Skinkie, how about option C-- what if we were to make a simple reference implementation of the viewer available to the community, so that Linux fans can go and do what they do best, to everyone's benefit? ;)
I imagine the synther is already Wine compatible, btw, but would appreciate if you could verify!

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 25, 2008 04:25 to the discussion "What features should we add to Photosynth?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

sprior, donut, or 'halo' as we call it, appears in certain places in certain synths-- when an 'object' is detected. What's an 'object'? It's when multiple shots seem to be focusing in on something from different angles but from a similar distance. Then, you see the halo in those shots. It goes away if you don't move the mouse. You can drag the halo to move among the object shots. You can also click on other available segments of the halo to move around that object, e.g. if available, go to a back or side view in a single click. Holding Ctrl to reveal the pointcloud while you drag the halo can be fun.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 25, 2008 04:14 to the idea "Keyboard commands - hidden features!" in Microsoft Live Labs:

JackH, the halo actually only appears in certain places in certain synths-- when an 'object' is detected. What's an 'object'? It's when multiple shots seem to be focusing in on something from different angles but from a similar distance. Then, you see the halo in those shots. Virtual Earth has a kind of green spike you can use to pivot around an arbitrary point, and it would be nice to have something like that in Photosynth. It's much harder, though, because we lack a known groundplane. We'd need that groundplane (or some other known 3D position) in order to disambiguate the mouse position into a 3D point to rotate around. When there's a halo, that point is the center of the object. Another problem is that if we were to allow rotation around arbitrary points, in the great majority of cases there'd be no appropriate photo to show when you rotate and release.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 25, 2008 03:57 to the question "When will a Mac version of Photosynth be available?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Shinzann, I won't rule it out, but to be brutally frank, I think the chances aren't good. This has nothing to do with operating system partisanship-- we're very keen to do the Mac version simply because lots of people with Macs are passionate photographers and early adopters of visual technology. We know that it hurts the community as a whole for there not to be a Mac implementation. But the cost to us of supporting additional platforms in binary code is substantial-- we have a small team, and such support must be balanced against lots of great features (for the rest of us) we could build with comparable resources. In other words, it's all about a kind of integrated value over the community. It's a tradeoff-- wider, or deeper? We don't imagine that a huge segment of our potential community works exclusively on Linux boxes. But if you have data that might cast doubt on this intuition, do please share.
I'm more optimistic about PowerPC, because as far as I understand the APIs and compilation tools are identical to the new Mac, so the cost may not be very high. But I'm not sure.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 25, 2008 03:05 to the discussion "What features should we add to Photosynth?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Scottt and Sanshyuum, 20GB is quite a lot of space-- not many of *us* have reached our quotas yet. For the couple who have, we've just increased the limit :). If you're motivated enough to fill your 20GB with fine synthiness, just send any of us an email and we'll be happy to increase your limit!

A comment on the discussion "What features should we add to Photosynth?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Peenie, please either keep it constructive or don't post. You're now neither asking for help nor offering feedback that's useful to us or to other users. – Blaise Aguera y Arcas, on August 25, 2008 02:08

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 25, 2008 02:03 to the question "Always 0% synthy. Why??" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Jesse64, I've had a look at your synths, and indeed they should be very synthy-- J2C Salon should be great. Something strange is going on here. Would you mind emailing me your logfile? Find it in your user temp directory, under Photosynther. Let's see if we can figure this out.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 24, 2008 18:41 to the idea "Website Enhancements" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Capo, I strongly agree. We went out with the absolute, bare minimum to get things rolling, but we know we need the kind of major enhancements in the web service you suggest. Thanks for giving us your specific list.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas started following the idea "Website Enhancements" in Microsoft Live Labs.

A comment on the discussion "What features should we add to Photosynth?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Thanks GODLIKE! Indeed-- we *know* there are tons of basic improvements, e.g. in community and synth management features, that we need to make, which is why many (though not all) of the comments on this page are so useful; we're also *very* aware of the many great places this could go in re. more complete 3D reconstruction, more seamless navigation, etc. (although personally I'll always want the integrity of the photos preserved also). But we also know that even with all its 'alpha', 'beta', '1.0' or '0.1' flaws (depending on your perspective and experience) there's lots of great stuff being done with this service. We've seen many examples. A synth doesn't have to be-- in fact shouldn't be-- just a mechanical covering of a space from every possible angle. Those who don't want to be bothered with something less than video-game-like 3D fidelity, come back in a year or two ;). – Blaise Aguera y Arcas, on August 24, 2008 18:34

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 24, 2008 04:34 to the problem "Photosynth ran out of memory during processing (8007000E)" in Microsoft Live Labs:

I think it's just a function of the number of photos-- any that you remove will reduce the memory burden. Photosynth is fine with blurry photos or photos that don't match-- they just don't end up in the same 'group'. I'm still puzzled that the 200 posed a problem on your machine-- not sure what's up with that.

A comment on the question "will a photosynth "offline" version be released ?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Benji, I do think your point is valid. – Blaise Aguera y Arcas, on August 24, 2008 04:24

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 24, 2008 04:18 to the idea "Speed up synth with nVidia or ATI GPU!" in Microsoft Live Labs:

There are some steps in the synthing process that could be GPU accelerated. I agree, this would be really fun to do.

A comment on the discussion "What features should we add to Photosynth?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

uh.. I think the coolness would be.. exactly the same! But yes, we're working on crossplatform compatibility. You do have an option other than bootcamp-- apparently VMware works too. – Blaise Aguera y Arcas, on August 24, 2008 04:05

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 24, 2008 04:01 to the problem "White quad error! Pictures not visible!" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Luke, this has actually happened to me also. I think it's due to a driver bug causing some sort of resource leak. I actually had to reboot my machine to resolve it-- killing all processes and restarting IE didn't do the trick. (Hence a driver bug seems involved, since it should never be the case that a user-mode program can leak video resources that aren't freed on exit.) I'd be curious to know what machine and graphics card you're using.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas replied on August 24, 2008 03:55 to the problem "Photosynth ran out of memory during processing (8007000E)" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Hm, this really shouldn't have been a problem. Maybe try rebooting? (Please no OS jokes :)