The Photosynth app was designed to help people make and share spherical panoramas.
The key to unlocking this design was the use of new computer vision techniques that allowed us to track the exact position of the camera in space.
Creating just the right amount of overlap was critical. Too little overlap and the app couldn’t stitch the photos together. Too much overlap took too long for the stitching process and often resulted in poor-quality panoramas.
Design prototypes were used to explore targeting assistance to help make complete spherical panoramas efficiently. This video is of a Processing prototype that shows targets that animate horizontally or vertically whenever a photo is taken. It shows the optimal position to take the next photo and automatically takes the photo if the target overlaps with the center of the camera.
Photosynth App
Transformed computer vision science into a groundbreaking phone app to create full spherical panoramas.
Computer vision breakthrough
The creation of a successful spherical panorama with a phone camera requires precise stitching of multiple photos. In 2010, new computer vision techniques made it possible to track the exact position of a phone camera in space. However, knowing the location of a photo was not enough; there had to be just the right amount of overlap between images. If photos had insufficient overlap, there was not enough information to make a clean seam or there were holes missing from the panorama. And photos with too much overlap took way too long to stitch. Numerous ways of communicating to users how to overlap photos correctly were explored. Built several prototypes in After Effects and Processing to get a real feel of the experience before creating final app spec.
Crowd sourcing Bing
This app was first released for iPhone in 2011 before being integrated into the Windows Phone. Strategically, this app was created to enable crowdsourcing of panoramic images to enhance Photosynth.net and Bing Maps with a more distant goal of building scaffolding for HoloLens augmented reality experiences of the future.
History
As a historical note, this Photosynth App was launched 15 April 2011. Apple added a flat one-directional pano capability to the iPhone in September 2012 (16 months later). The Photosynth App was removed from the app store in July 2015 but similar pano functionality exists in the Microsoft Pix app launched in 2017.
Award
Tech Crunch: The Top 20 iPhone and iPad Apps of 2011. Photosynth App was chosen as one of the best iOS apps.