This has been around for a while and I always meant to get round to using it but there was never the occation. Well this week our pupils have been hard at work creating and designing our new entrance space. We have used a blog to gather ideas and plan a wall display with all the ideas. I wanted a way of capturing the detail of the wall display so I thought of Photosynth.

I took my trusty 5MP class Kodak and went snapping. I had no idea of what to do, so I just snapped away for 5 minutes or so. I took the memory card home (good chance the software won’t work in school) and installed photosynth on my PC. The app appears to be little more than a bulk uploader, I would guess there are some pretty big servers in the Photosynth basement doing the work. It asked me for a name and description then off it went. Pretty soon I had the following result (Press play button for what I think is the best effect)

I was fairly happy with the result but I wanted a nice panorama. I had taken a panoramic shot at the start of the shoot, so fired it into Image Composite Editor and got the following. I even saved it as a PNG, but at 30MB I will keep it off the blog.

So what next? Well I plan to reshoot the whole thing once it is up on display properly.

• I will use a digital SLR to get a bit more speed on the shoot.
• The next panorma will be shot in a lot more detail from a single location.
• The next synth will be tried with those pictures and some close ups of the text.

Oh and as a side note it would have been better if the kids didn’t wite upside down, but that’s round tables for you 😉

All in all a nice little piece of free software 🙂 Oh! did I mention there is an iPhone app of the same name that does the same thing?