Joshua Podolak's dashboard

Joshua Podolak replied on June 23, 2009 19:18 to the question "How can I "encourage" photosynth to recognize similarity between photos?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Hi Skiabe.
There is currently no way for you to explicitly attach two images.

Generally, Photosynth needs 3 images that have 3 seperate points in common in order to connect them.

Joshua Podolak replied on June 22, 2009 22:58 to the question "Not a big complaint but still..." in Microsoft Live Labs:

Hey Secrecyguy.

I tried looking, but I didn't find any example of a synth that you created that was less than ~95% synthy (great job BTW).

Could you attach a link to one of the synths where things didn't work out please? I'd love to take a look at it.

Joshua Podolak replied on March 30, 2009 20:28 to the question "Photosynth ran out of memory. Try again with fewer photos." in Microsoft Live Labs:

Hi Lost.
Unfortunatly, 1200 pictures is about the max that Photosynth can currently do. If you really want to squeeze in a few more pictures, try going to the control panel and shutting down some other programs that may be running in the background.

Joshua Podolak replied on March 30, 2009 20:25 to the question "cant see the photos dude, will be cool some help thanks" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Hi. Can you tell me what you *can* see? Pointcloud? Buttons? Or are you just getting a blank screen?

Joshua Podolak replied on March 30, 2009 20:24 to the question "What's the best size/resolution for taking pictures for Photosynth?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Hi Andrew.
Obviously, with higher quality, the viewing experience gets better (since you can zoom in more). If all you're going for is synthing quality, then 2 megapixels is currently all the photosynther uses.

Joshua Podolak replied on March 18, 2009 00:18 to the question "Planning privacy settings for Photosynth?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Hi David.

We're actively working on the privacy issue and plan to have a version shipping this Spring.

Hope this helps.
Joshua

Joshua Podolak replied on March 18, 2009 00:15 to the problem "Photosynth crashed Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) on Vista" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Hmmm...

Can you try the uninstall/reinstall trick?

Joshua Podolak replied on February 04, 2009 22:48 to the problem "Photosynth only displays a blank screen" in Microsoft Live Labs:

I looked at the card capabilities, and while the card you have is not top of the line, it definitely fills all the requirements, so I'm not sure why you're having trouble. I passed your issue on to some of our graphics-card experts, but I haven't gotten a response yet.

Joshua Podolak replied on February 02, 2009 17:38 to the idea "Flying to the place!" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Hey PGric.

Just a heads up that your suggestion is being taken seriously by the website design team. No promises, but I think you might see such a feature in around two months.

Joshua Podolak replied on January 29, 2009 19:46 to the question "Black Donut or Halo in synth" in Microsoft Live Labs:

huh.

The halo is drawn using some d3d shading code. Obviously, this doesn't work for you, resulting in an unshaded halo.

Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do for this right immediately, but we'll take a closer look at your hardware/os/driver configuration and try and get it fixed for our next software update.

If you let the image rest for a while (say 5 seconds), does the halo fade away or disappear?

Joshua Podolak replied on January 29, 2009 19:39 to the idea "Three Image Requirement - Dumb Software!!!" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Hi awalling:

To answer your question: Not currently.

If you want Photosynth to pick up the meld, it needs enough information in the pictures to figure out where the photos were taken from.

It's basically this big mathematical optimization that requires enough constraints (in the form of "this point is the same as that point, so they must be in the place in space") to figure out where all the pictures were taken with respect to each other, so we need at least three points in common over three images, or things won't meld.

Joshua Podolak replied on January 29, 2009 19:28 to the problem "Photosynth only displays a blank screen" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Sorry. The driver for my card/OS had been updated Nov08. The FX3000 June08 driver for Win32 is indeed the latest one.

Lets see...
Could you try the following link:

http://photosynth.net/silverlight

, and see if our Silverlight viewer works?

Meanwhile, I'll go talk to someone and see if I can't find anything that might give us a clue to your problem.

Joshua Podolak replied on January 29, 2009 19:16 to the idea "Flying to the place!" in Microsoft Live Labs:

PGric: Good point. I seem to recall there might have been such a design originally, but it was dropped because having a bunch of different icons to was deemed too confusing.

I'll point our designers/ web developers at your suggestion.

Pierrot21: Sorry about not being able to tag in 'birds eye' . I'll look into that.

Joshua Podolak replied on January 28, 2009 01:33 to the question "deleting what is already uploaded" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Hi Mike.
Do you still have the problem?

We would be very interested if there's anyone who can't delete their synths.

Joshua Podolak marked one of PGric's replies in Microsoft Live Labs as useful. PGric replied to the question "deleting what is already uploaded".

Joshua Podolak replied on January 28, 2009 01:31 to the problem "When trying to view a synth, I get an unable to open error message" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Hi Jamie.
Sorry for not getting back to you earlier. The error message you're seeing generally only comes up when the target dzc file physically does not exist.

Since this is obviously *not* the case, the current assumption is that something is blocking the data from getting to the applications.

Here's some things to try:

1. Have you tried synthing anything yet? Try running the synther and synth together any old set of 3 or more images. If there is some network issue, we might get a further crash bug that might shed light on the issue

2. The usual uninstall/reinstall routine. Do you recall if there was any weirdness during the original install?

3. Proxy settings. How are you connecting to the internet? Could the proxy be blocking requests from Seadragon/Photosynth?

4. Firewall/anti-virus. Can you try disabling all of these programs for a second, and see if you manage to get through?

Joshua Podolak replied on January 28, 2009 00:33 to the problem "error message 'A0000008'" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Hi Zur.
The "2 of 3" comes from the fact that most of your images have been uploaded already (perhaps in a previous synth?). There's no reason for photosynth to upload them a second time.

As for the A000008 error. Can you tell if it happend on a specific image?

Joshua Podolak replied on January 28, 2009 00:31 to the question "An Image has to be loaded again when I get back to it from another image." in Microsoft Live Labs:

Hi gsolarino.

A large synth can have multi-hundred megapixel images. If we kept the entire synth in memory, it could get quite prohibitive, esp. in the case of lower-end machines. Photosynth uses a cache to make sure that the amount of memory used by the program has an upper limit. We tried to find the right balance of memory, graphics card memory, bandwidth and CPU usage that will work well on a large set of machines.

If you have a high-end machine but a slow internet connection, then images may resolve more slowly than they would have had we used a larger cache.

Joshua Podolak replied on January 28, 2009 00:23 to the idea "Three Image Requirement - Dumb Software!!!" in Microsoft Live Labs:

You mean to say we'll never get it to synth with 1 image? Is that like.... .....trivial?

Joshua Podolak replied on January 28, 2009 00:21 to the idea "Deleting for the best!" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Thanks for the info. I'll forward this to our designers.