(no subject)

[lethargic_man]

This is pretty cool (though also a little gimmicky).

That has the power to close the gap between Google Earth and the Earth program in Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash that inspired it, which combines satellite data with aerial photography and real-time photographs.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Impressive indeed.

I think that's the first time Microsoft has come up with something I can honestly admire.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The lots-of-pictures interface is the kind of thing that ought to turn up given modern graphics support. Initially striking, but really just making excellent use of things that are already there. You might see Google Earth and Exposé as its natural predecessors.

Pasting photos together based just on their content is perhaps more striking but even so, photo-stitching isn't new.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Maybe you keep your eye on the ball more than I do.

What I want to know is: if they can identify all these found images and match them up, and splice them together; how come we still live in a world where spammers can get around spam filters by putting their content in an image?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The key remark (about the lots-of-pictures interface) is right at the start: its complexity is related to the number of pixels in the final display, not in the input. With modern hardware that's a perfectly tractable number. (Don't get me wrong: what they've done is imaginative and effective and was surely not just dashed off in an afternoon.)

As for the spam problem: firstly Microsoft can dedicated a lot more resources to their demo than you (or your ISP) can to spam filtering; secondly email has to be processed in a timely manner; thirdly pictures of cathedrals don't actively mutate in an effort to frustrate your processing techniques.

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

I wonder if my expensive laptop I got from the college would give such a high solution. If this a new invention I guess it is not accessible for everybody yet.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

It's not a case of the resolution of your screen; it's a case of whether your machine has the computing power to do all that zooming in in real-time.