tahrey's Profile

Recent activity

Subscribe to this feed

A comment on the idea "The ability to selectively add or delete photos to a Photosynth." in Microsoft Live Labs:

Nathaniel... something I'd been meaning to try recently but haven't been able to get the time to play with it (only here because reply notification landed in my email ;) was sneakily taking a load of screenshot images from, e.g. Google or Bing street view and seeing if some kind of synth could be made out of them, whether the engine would accept them and come up with some kind of mindblowingly cool 3D translation of those images. It'd be locked to the path the car took of course, and all the buildings would be at a single distance from the cam (so something completely along the lines of the classic Venice synth may not work, unless we could also use an auto-stitch feature to create panoramas/extended width shots as part of the process), but would create an excellent base to build upon, for 3D models, integrating 3rd party and user synths & images, etc.

I haven't even had chance to properly try out Bing streetview and the synth integration with that yet, so maybe it even works on that level already :D --- would something that works that way be a feature you'd look to include in future? Go straight and near-seamlessly from the "official", baseline streetview made in a rather crude fashion by someone driving a car and getting time-lapse imagery, into a more detailed synth submitted by joe random focussing on a particular point of interest. EG for one thing in my own city, the camera car might have driven past Spitfire Island (a roundabout/traffic circle with a sculpture on it commemorating an important WW2 airfield, and factory making the eponymous aircraft flying from it) without paying it any special attention (it's partway along a major road, after all), but there'd be zoom panels taking you to one - or more, spliced? - synths of the actual sculpture made by a local shutterbug. And maybe even the same in reverse...? – tahrey, on December 09, 2009 18:11
A comment on the idea "The ability to selectively add or delete photos to a Photosynth." in Microsoft Live Labs:

Nathaniel... something I'd been meaning to try recently but haven't been able to get the time to play with it (only here because reply notification landed in my email ;) was sneakily taking a load of screenshot images from, e.g. Google or Bing street view and seeing if some kind of synth could be made out of them, whether the engine would accept them and come up with some kind of mindblowingly cool 3D translation of those images. It'd be locked to the path the car took of course, and all the buildings would be at a single distance from the cam (so something completely along the lines of the classic Venice synth may not work, unless we could also use an auto-stitch feature to create panoramas/extended width shots as part of the process), but would create an excellent base to build upon, for 3D models, integrating 3rd party and user synths & images, etc.

I haven't even had chance to properly try out Bing streetview and the synth integration with that yet, so maybe it even works on that level already :D --- would something that works that way be a feature you'd look to include in future? Go straight and near-seamlessly from the "official", baseline streetview made in a rather crude fashion by someone driving a car and getting time-lapse imagery, into a more detailed synth submitted by joe random focussing on a particular point of interest. EG for one thing in my own city, the camera car might have driven past Spitfire Island (a roundabout/traffic circle with a sculpture on it commemorating an important WW2 airfield, and factory making the eponymous aircraft flying from it) without paying it any special attention (it's partway along a major road, after all), but there'd be zoom panels taking you to one - or more, spliced? - synths of the actual sculpture made by a local shutterbug. And maybe even the same in reverse...? – tahrey, on December 09, 2009 17:48
tahrey replied on April 29, 2009 14:05 to the idea "The ability to selectively add or delete photos to a Photosynth." in Microsoft Live Labs:

Problem is that doing something like that would take an enormous amount of processing power itself - likely several times more than the average "per picture" time as it then has to check against all the existing images in the synth, make new paths relating it to them (and them back to it), etc. EG for a 200 picture one that takes 3 hours to process, easily more than a minute per picture to stitch in a new one - probably 5-10 mins or more. Not something you really want to be doing via a silverlight client over a consumer broadband connection, nor having to bodge it and offload the strain to the servers. Similarly there'd be extra work to patch the hole left by deleting a broken one, unless it genuinely added nothing to the synth (and even then, there'd have to be recalculation if the the suspicion is that it was disrupting the synthiness of everything else somehow).

This, I suspect, is why it hasn't been implemented and we end up having to do over from scratch .... because inserting or removing (or both), say, 10 images, would take almost as long as simply doing a whole new synth AND yield less satisfactory results.

Do you think this is one of the best points? Mark it as a good point
A comment on the question "What does Error 80004005 mean ?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Wow Dan, that's one delayed response :) I think you may not get many replies to the questions you're asking in this thread, as it was like 4-5 months since any of the previous entries were posted, which is an eon in Photosynth years. I admire the eagerness to help, but it's more than likely all the data - and probably a lot of the human memories - have been lost to history now. Certainly I didn't even remember I'd done that massive room decoration synth until this popped up in my email, I re-read the thread and was reminded of it.
(Why is this text entry box so damn small? It's making editing and keeping a coherent grasp of what I'm writing (language isn't my best skill) very difficult. Like using one of those old electric typewriters with the 80x2 display)

I think it probably isn't giving that error any more even if I was to use the same image set (I think the "removed" pictures were deleted, rather than just dropped from the synth list), given there's been multiple updates since etc. In any case that log file will have been long since overwritten!

Never mind, I haven't had any such errors with it of late, it seems fairly solid. There's just the occasional protracted lockup when I'm trying to add a second set of pictures to a synth I'm already preparing *while* another one is running (it seems it needs to finish whichever particular stage it's on of the running synth before the prep/filebrowser/whichever thread gets any more cycles and comes back to life - luckily it hasn't yet happened during the "matching images" stage of a huuuuge synth... and it only occurs on my work desktop Celeron, which is heinously weak at multitasking, and already suffers some odd issues when it comes to image folder browsing - but these normally occur when opening the file explorer, rather than pressing "OK" to close it and add the pics, as it does here...), and the even more occasional all-out crash. Nothing too much to worry about so long as the more general stability can be sorted out.

Oh, and still some of my synths are having some rather wierd match-ups, but it's improving to the point where I can often see what's caused it reasonably well (ie it's being caught out by the same things a human would, if said human was somewhat amnesiac and had tunnel vision - which I assume is similar to how the algorithm works) and can zap some of the offending images, so that I don't e.g. end up with two intersecting scenes where there should only be one (a particularly good one recently was a walk down a country path and over a single-track rail line ... because of some images having rather poor exposure, it's got confused to the point of thinking there's *two* completely seperate rail lines, about 10-15 yards apart from each other... with about a 50-50 split on which of the other pictures synth to which copy of the line) – tahrey, on January 23, 2009 09:43
tahrey replied on October 08, 2008 10:00 to the problem "Strange error - "Failed", Code A0000007, but synth has uploaded successfully (it hasn't worked very well, though!)... what's that all about?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Yeah, I know it's a crap subject and was prepared for it going a bit wrong, but maybe not quite *as* wrong. I tried with this reduced version of it to only include pictures where there was a reasonable amount of unique features and good overlaps... problem is PS doesn't seem to like anything white or light grey even if there IS detail in it! If I do anything similar in future I'll have a quick play with the "levels" feature in Paintshop (e.g. make the max luminance 223 instead of 255 but bring the gamma up to stop it being too dark) and turn the colour saturation up quite strong, see if that helps.

I wouldn't really have even bothered trying, but for someone else commenting on a previous one (showing the need for redecoration with the ceiling all pulled down and broken) saying "do an 'after' synth!". As stated in the actual description I may replace it with a version with the furniture etc in, if I get a sunny weekend - and get the motivation!

Not totally my choice of wallpaper by the way, but options were limited as the house is intended to be sold before it's next changed. I'm dreading the first time I wake up in there after having one too many beers...

Thanks for the compliments though!

Next I'll be seeing how little of an overlap we can get away with I think, because that's likely the best way to get good coverage of a room, or a wide outdoor area, without having tons of photos ... what I've done with this one to end up with nearly 700 is simply follow the instructions in the guide! (Take from each corner, with overlapping panoramas - maybe i need a wider angle lens?)
But, also taking high/low shots as the carpet and ceiling were actually meant for inclusion (i know that may be unusual) and with the camera on continual shot so I don't die of old age or use up several sets of batteries by individually composing them - it would help to have some high power lighting so I can move faster without causing blurring. The technique seems to work better outdoors.

I've plenty of the tele-synth things I want to do just from what's in my TiVo-like set top box, but I don't think my equipment's up to the job unfortunately (those stupid overlays are because my camera otherwise won't capture quick enough on the fast sweeps (need the equivalent of 6-8 fps instead of 2) and I can't turn the OSD off in slo-mo mode, and extracting the images from movie mode --- which operates at 30fps to my TV's 25 or 50 --- will be a pain). Just struck me as a neat thing to try as their cameras go to so many places - and times - that most of us will never get opportunity to do. How about an aerial helicopter circuit of Mount St Helens from the days before, and then after, it blew? Even if that was happening next week instead of 25 years ago, how many of us would have access to a chopper, and the second-sight required to time it properly?

Anyway .... so long as this may have useful diagnostic info in....

Must dash - good luck & best wishes!

Do you think this solves the problem? Mark it as solved
tahrey replied on October 08, 2008 09:43 to the question "What does error 85EA2207 mean?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Oh wow, that's fantastic :D :D :D lol'ing genuinely for another reason now...

What's maybe happened there is that the original pics had too many mini reflections in that confused it and rescaling them has blurred them out. Congrats on such a huge project fully synthing, and finding a great subject to try it with!

(8Gb Quad? *slather* awllgwelggh... :-) I'm struggling by on a 2Gb old-gen Celeron at this particular desk --- I guess you genuinely have run across the limits of 32-bit code instead!)

Do you think this answers the question? Mark it as answered
A comment on the question "I can't upload Photos... Appears Error 80004005 HELP PLZ" in Microsoft Live Labs:

It's OK though really as I know it could be complex to implement. Just pointing out that this is all we get.
At least is hasn't gone *completely* back to the start, as I've done synths where the source images have been picked & chosen from three or four folders on two different discs before (the same thing but different angles, dates & cameras) - that would have been a pain! – tahrey, on October 08, 2008 09:39
A comment on the question "Getting Photosynth updates" in Microsoft Live Labs:

That's quite inspired actually Nathanael, thanks for pointing it out. I've got it updated now independently, but if it has problems doing it automatically in future (and assuming I can get that level of browser settings access - I'm surprised it even runs here, my excuse is it might actually be potentially useful for my job) I'll give that a try.

It's a strange catch 22 that if there's a bug in v ....6 that prevents it from auto-updating, then no new version you release with that bug fixed will automatically clear the problem anyway - they'll all need a manual update. But previous auto-updating versions will presumably have updated through to ....6 for any user that logs on regularly enough to not have skipped that release. Headache time! – tahrey, on October 08, 2008 09:37
A comment on the question "What does Error 80004005 mean ?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

FFS .... ok, it did finally work, but it's pretty naff. And it's thrown up a wierd error (see topic i posted a few minutes ago). Think I may just give up, delete it, and try again with all the strangely-arranged furniture in the room as that'll be a bit meatier and not as ditchwater dull. – tahrey, on October 06, 2008 20:37
A comment on the problem "Failed (Error A000000B)" in Microsoft Live Labs:

i'm having trouble understanding that, Xan, but I would caution that an hour is not always the best cut-off point. if you have a lot of large photos and a slow connection, it might genuinely need more than an hour to send (and certainly more than that to process on a less-than-hardcore cpu).

e.g. 100mb of images would just about max out a 256kbit upload allowance for that 60 minute period (and remember uploads generally go at a max of between 1/2 and 1/8 the rated download speed depending on your isp - so potentially as low as 128kbit on a 1mbit download line)

also the available speed can vary due to all manner of conditions so stopping and starting over can seem to "clear" it when it would have got faster anyway. bit of a false economy if you have to do all the processing again. – tahrey, on October 06, 2008 20:35
tahrey replied on October 06, 2008 20:31 to the question "I can't upload Photos... Appears Error 80004005 HELP PLZ" in Microsoft Live Labs:

>_< ok, so comments, even deleted ones, stop you from editing the main post. gah.

here's another attempt at uploading that pic as it obviously didn't work the first time.

Do you think this answers the question? Mark it as answered
tahrey replied on October 06, 2008 20:30 to the question "I can't upload Photos... Appears Error 80004005 HELP PLZ" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Bert - unfortunately, I actually don't. To make use of my so-called "failed" synth from earlier today (see pic), all I can do with it is "edit", i.e. start completely over from scratch, only saving the minimal time spent adding the pictures to the synth list, tagging/titling them and choosing copyright/preview thumbnail. It still takes many many hours for the bigger ones to process and upload, rather than, say, continuing from where a hung-up router caused it to surrender after a certain number of connection retries, or allowing me to delete an offending image (say, one that had corruption which wasn't immediately obvious) and backtrack to wherever it was about to attempt processing it... sounds simpler than it is, probably, but the log suggests it's all broken up into discrete stages at the single-picture level rather than being a continual flow, so maybe?

Do you think this answers the question? Mark it as answered
tahrey reported a problem in Microsoft Live Labs on October 06, 2008 20:12:

Strange error - "Failed", Code A0000007, but synth has uploaded successfully (it hasn't worked very well, though!)... what's that all about?
Pictures speak louder than words, really...

This took AGES - 18+ hours to synth - but finally popped onto my list when checking it sometime in the afternoon at work. The main few groups have worked ok enough individually, though there's some bizarre wierd errors in the stitching such as I've suffered inexplicably in a couple of recent attempts... it seems to randomly get the scaling and/or position and/or orientation of almost identical images completely messed up in relation to each other, spawning obvious but strangely beautiful wierdness in the point clouds (like the whole scene is being ripped apart by a black hole, or the LHC). And the detail areas haven't stitched into the main synth at all despite doing the gradual zoom thing and making sure they're covered from several angles.

ANYWAY. Got home, found that the client was reporting that it had failed with this error, with a "why did this happen" etc. Glad I found out in that order so I didn't then waste a load of time re-synthing it only to find that it either failed because of a duplicate name, or having the existing one overwritten and/or corrupted before I even realised it was actually there!

Top & tail of logfile:
PSWebClient version 2.0.1403.14
Target: x86 OMP
Running on Windows 5.1.2600 Service Pack 3
Wow64: no
Processor: architecture 0 family 6 model 13 stepping 8
Number of processors: 1
Memory available: physical 1015 MB virtual 2047 MB
17:16:04 VtApp: Setting service URL to http://photosynth.net/photosynthws/Ph...
17:16:05 VtApp: Created collection f5380bfa-35e1-4b56-94ac-4a8760be528c
17:16:05 VtApp: Secondary service URL: http://d3.photosynth.net/photosynthws...
17:16:05 VtApp: Converting image: D:\My Pictures\photographs\newer pics\photosynths\new room\reduced\IMG_8177_small.jpg
17:16:06 VtApp: Adding image: IMG_8177_small.jpg
17:16:06 VtApp: Don't need to upload IMG_8177_small.jpg
17:16:06 VtApp: Converting image: D:\My Pictures\photographs\newer pics\photosynths\new room\reduced\IMG_8178_small.jpg
17:16:07 VtApp: Adding image: IMG_8178_small.jpg
17:16:08 VtApp: Don't need to upload IMG_8178_small.jpg

(now there's an interesting thing ... there's a lot of that. is it because it's already uploaded it previously at some point (this WAS a 3rd time retry, after having it fail very dismally with 90+ subsynths, deleting a load of pictures, having it fall over completely from "lack of memory" despite being fine beforehand, restarting the pc to allow some auto updates to complete, and starting over with the 'removed' pictures never added in at all this time), or because i'd downconverted it to just under 1.5mpx (that PS allegedly does in order to do the point matching)? the initial stages did seem to go quite quickly before settling down to the many many hours of hard CPU toil)

lots of lots of bumpf, then:

Synth 75 : 2 images, 51 points
0: 655 http://mslabs-745.vo.llnwd.net/d6/pho... (D:\My Pictures\photographs\newer pics\photosynths\new room\reduced\IMG_8933_small.jpg)
1: 656 http://mslabs-317.vo.llnwd.net/d6/pho... (D:\My Pictures\photographs\newer pics\photosynths\new room\reduced\IMG_8934_small.jpg)
10:06:59 VtApp: Uploading "synth.bin" file C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\Photosynther\collection.synth.bin (1477468 bytes).
10:09:37 VtApp: CollectionUploader: UploadFile:Write failed hr(0x80072EFF), retry 0
10:11:03 VtApp: CollectionUploader: UploadFile:Write failed hr(0x80072EFF), retry 1
10:11:37 VtApp: CollectionUploader: UploadFile:Send failed hr(0x80072EFD), retry 2
10:13:40 VtApp: CollectionUploader: UploadFile:Write failed hr(0x80072EFF), retry 3
10:15:26 VtApp: CollectionUploader: UploadFile:Write failed hr(0x80072EFF), retry 4
10:19:13 VtApp: CollectionUploader: UploadFile:Write failed hr(0x80072EFF), retry 5
11:30:49 VtApp: Upload finished
11:30:49 VtApp: Uploading "dzc" file C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\Photosynther\collection.dzcz (4452200 bytes).
11:50:41 VtApp: CollectionUploader: UploadFile:Write failed hr(0x80072EFF), retry 0
11:51:08 VtApp: CollectionUploader: UploadFile:Send failed hr(0x80072EFD), retry 1
11:53:41 VtApp: CollectionUploader: UploadFile:Write failed hr(0x80072EFF), retry 2
11:56:30 VtApp: CollectionUploader: UploadFile:Write failed hr(0x80072EFF), retry 3
11:59:11 VtApp: CollectionUploader: UploadFile:Write failed hr(0x80072EFF), retry 4
12:04:45 VtApp: CollectionUploader: UploadFile:Write failed hr(0x80072EFF), retry 5
14:18:29 VtApp: Upload finished
14:19:02 VtApp: CollectionUploader: CommitCollection failed hr(0x80004005), retry 0
SOAP client error: 0
14:19:38 VtApp: CollectionUploader: CommitCollection failed hr(0x80004005), retry 1
SOAP client error: 0
14:20:27 VtApp: CollectionUploader: CommitCollection failed hr(0x80004005), retry 2
SOAP client error: 0
14:21:13 VtApp: CollectionUploader: CommitCollection failed hr(0x80004005), retry 3
SOAP client error: 0
exception CollectionUploader.cpp(586) hr(0xA0000007)
exception SynthPipeline.cpp(275) hr(0xA0000007)

...that looks like it could have been important and maybe why things didn't fit together right?
(also, Synth no.75? there's nowhere near that many pic groups in the finished article - it's somewhere in the high 20s/low 30s, and the orphan pic pile is only a little over one line long)

PS the connection errors I'm not really that puzzled by, I think it's down to either my router, cable modem, or ISP in general having a protracted spasm that's interfering with all my internetting - in fact it's taken me about a half hour and two hard resets (>30s full blackout power cycle for both units, AND turning my laptop's wireless off for a minute each time) to get this far since making that screenshot... and I'm not sure if this edit will get through OK. The modem is like 7 or 8 years old already, the router is heading towards 2 years but outstayed its welcome almost out of the box (hateful, awful Linksys WRT54-GC ... but there's never been the time or cash to replace it in between!). And given both my hooning about with mass uploads to/viewings on here and downloads from all sorts of other web 2.0-ey media rich sites, and my brother's incessant bit torrenting of hugemongous things & Xbox Live-ing, I wouldn't be surprised if our ISP was about to launch some kind of massive hate smear campaign on us, so our connection may be subject to all kinds of restrictions and caps right now :)
Unless of course there's been some significant known connection issues to the PS servers themselves, as it seemed to connect and work OK for all the other parts of the process.
A comment on the problem "Which are the Photosynth system requirements?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

...and it solves the white box problem too! Thanks :)

However it seems a bit slower now and i'm getting a different set of wierd errors. Ho hum. All in the name of research! – tahrey, on October 06, 2008 19:55
A comment on the problem "Which are the Photosynth system requirements?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

....and for the white box issue also! Nice, thanks. (Though I'm now getting a different variety of errors on the creation site ... and it seems slower somehow, though I don't have any way to benchmark it) – tahrey, on October 06, 2008 19:49
tahrey marked one of Jonathan's replies in Microsoft Live Labs as useful. Jonathan replied to the problem "Which are the Photosynth system requirements?".
A comment on the idea "Keyboard commands - hidden features!" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Gah, the layout of them is starting to become a bit annoying now - is there any way to move the "right hand" group to the left a bit so one doesn't end up accidentally hitting "P" or " ' " or "," or "." all the damn time when trying to use the rather spread out L-;-#-[ set that surrounds them. (I'm thinking there is maybe a disconnect between the keys I have there and the US ones, but the positions are probably the same; L for Pan Left, ; for Pan Down, then the next one to the right for "switch between 2D and 3D", then the furthest right for Pan Right, and the rest as you expect them. Also a switching of the fullscreen key (F) to some other appropriate letter (not necessarily the capital!) to similarly separate it a little further from the WASDEC group? Spacebar, even :)

I'm trying to whiz around a nice pointcloud and continually zipping to the thumbnail view or accidentally skipping back & forth thru the pic sequence which sometimes means ending up in a different group... :) Of course, the window/fullscreen switch isn't as disruptive, – tahrey, on October 06, 2008 13:51
tahrey replied on October 06, 2008 13:42 to the question "Getting Photosynth updates" in Microsoft Live Labs:

I'm trying to find the link to the update as well, now. It solved some problems on my home machine but I can't any longer remember which topic had the link posted in it. Would it be possible just to put a small link on the PS homepage or something, please? I know it's in this forum somewhere but it's going to take a while to find - and I already tried searching for "update" and this is where it dropped me!

Do you think this answers the question? Mark it as answered
tahrey started following the question "Getting Photosynth updates" in Microsoft Live Labs.
A comment on the question "What does error 85EA2207 mean?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

all I can say is... "lol"
that's probably your computer saying "aaaaggghhh, no more, no more!!"
mine craps out at about 800 2-mpx pics and ~500mb, and i already thought that was ambitious when i tried it! scale it back a bit and see if it works. For one thing it won't any longer take 3 days to calculate and upload the stuff. I'm starting to find that when I try to plaster an area with a squillion photos you can actually go too far the other way and PS's streamlined algorithms start to get lost because there's too many steps in the stitching process. – tahrey, on October 06, 2008 13:38

tahrey's dashboard

About me

Recent activity