Given the highly variable, but frequently excellent conceptual quality of the stuff on YouTube, I'd half go with that, I suspect that some of us older dropins are being snowed by the volume of material without grokking that if 60% of a given population has access to the tools, there will be an awful lot more stuff produced than if only 3% have access to them.
And there will be a lot more very compelling material produced. But whatever the reality, it feels like there is a major shift going on in graphical use of the net right now. YouTube aside, there is stuff going on in still photography that is at least as interesting and, in a couple of cases something like genuine 2.0 thinking.
First stop is this outstanding stuff;
H.D.R. is one of many digital darkroom techniques catching the fancy of amateur photographers. With the rising popularity of digital single-lens reflex cameras and more powerful personal computers has come a growing interest in visual experiments.
At the same time, software makers like Adobe are increasingly automating many of those processes, including H.D.R. While they may not always be straightforward, tricky digital techniques no longer require months of experience or hours of study.
Although H.D.R. photos are often compared to paintings, they are an attempt by software makers to allow photography to more accurately mimic human vision.
My Canon Powershot already does a pretty good job of stitching together a panorama out of overlapping shots, so there is no earthly reason why I shouldn't expect the next version to be programmable to shoot 3 or 4 photos, 1,000th of a second apart along a continuum of shutter speeds to get exactly this effect if I want. But that's just the photography, what's happening to the photos is much more interesting. This from Euan. A small world just got smaller
So having read a post by Bernie Goldbach about searching Flickr for your upcoming holiday destinations I do a search for pictures tagged with Gassin (the tiny village in the South Of France we are about to visit) and find that a load of them were taken by my mate Lee Bryant!
Brilliantly simple; and Flickr already lets me leave a message for the photographer to ask for more information about the place; like where to stay, what to do there, where to eat, drink, make merry usw. No doubt someone will organise that a bit more but this alone is a good start. But the real web 2.0 stuff fires up with this post from Ton. 3D photo exploration with Photosynth
cool, reverse lookup via correlated images.Yesterday Björn Kolbeek pointed me to Photosynth of Microsoft Live Labs. It is a technology that stitches photo's from different sources together to create 3D representations of actual locations. You would be able to fly through a 3D world, entering through a photo on any website and flying out to another website through any of the other photo's that constitute the 3D rendering.
It was presented at the SIGGRAPH 2006 conference, which is being held this week in Boston, USA. Techcrunch also has an article.
The cool part of this app is not that the idea to create a 3D representation of something is new or unique. We've had panoramic virtual tours for quite some time already. What is unique though is that it builds on the multitude of contributions of Internet users all over the world. Imagine it not only using all photo sites like Flickr, 23, and the like, but also each and every photo that is used on any site somewhere.
This kind of visual representation would also be another great and important building block in combining the geographic landscape with the information landscape that is the Internet. In the video on the Photosynth website one of the suggestions of use, next to virtual tourism or checking out venues beforehand, is to be able to find out the exact location of a building you photographed but don't remember where. Simply by 'diving into' your own photo published on Flickr, you would find yourself 'inside' the panorama stitched together from everybody's photo's of that spot. Step through the looking glass, if you dare.
And how about this for size, if this technology had been available at Daly Plaza, it could have pulled together all the photos from every witness and reconstructed the event in 3D that law enforcement people could have flown through, looking for more evidence that might have been only partially visible in multiple photos, but reconstructable from their stitching together in 3D.
And this story of lies and corruption would have been even more rapidly and tellingly deconstructed than it was because it would not have depended on anyone remembering, having been crawled by a search engine, it would have been merged into it 3D matrix and all we would have to have done was fly back into it to find out where it was.
I think we might be passing through one of those Internet gateways into yet another plateau of capabilities that would have made my father, who was a bit of a technology fan, have to pick up his jaw from the floor yet again.
And we? We'll moan about how its not good, fast, cheap or simple enough, and keep pushing.
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