Posts Tagged ‘photosynth’

Photosynth website on steroids :)

February 3rd, 2014

Bad idea: hacking during the new year holiday and during the super bowl go Seahawks! Result? A very hacky google chrome extension which is adding several alpha/beta quality features to the photosynth.net website. This is my gift for 2014, enjoy! :)

You can get the extension here. Make sure you are logged in on photosynth.net (and have joined the beta) while using the extension as some photosynth2 feature are still only available to beta users (hopefully this limitation will be removed soon).

Feature added by the extension:

The extension is changing the top menu to:

  • Search: previous Explore page + new links to fullscreen grid based ps2 explore page.
  • Explore: new fullscreen map based explore page.
  • My Synths: previous My Photosynths page + new tab (my map, my ps2, my info).
  • Preview: link to the new preview website + animated preview on the create page.

Search:

Animated preview when you hover a thumbnail of a PS2 + links to new explore page.

Clicking on “Explore most recent PS2″ or “Explore most viewed PS2″ will display a page like this:

The bottom row contains the latest synths of the current user (the one of the current synth being played). You can hover to see a preview and click to load a synth. Experimental feature: it’s using a new version of the viewer capable of quickly unload/load synths (don’t click too fast :-) ).

Explore:

New fullscreen page showing synths (ps1, panorama and ps2) on a map. Sadly there is no proper ranking here so you need to zoom in a lot before being able to see synths. Also there is a known bug in google chrome which is preventing from seeing silverlight content opened in new tab.

My Synths:

The extension add 3 new tabs: My map, My PS2, My info

My map

This page is really complicated, adding a lot of feature… I will propably have another post explaining how to use it.

Basically you can map (=geotag) your own synths (ps1, panorama, ps2). You need to be logged in and click on ‘show untagged synths’ then you can search for a place on the map, move the orange pushpin or right click to reassign it location. Then once the orange pushpin is at the place where you’ve captured your synth, you can click on ‘assign pushpin location’ to assign the location to the corresponding synth. To select synths, you can press and hold ‘ctrl’ and then draw a rectangle, from that selection you can either remove their map position or assign them a text tag. Clicking on ‘movable pushpins’ will allow you to directly move your synth pushpins on the map. You can click on on ‘Find neighbors’ to find synths arround your synth (orange synth = community, green = yours). You can also play with the timeline to only display synths captured in the corresponding time interval. You can also change the url and switch w=0 to w=1 to enable the wikipedia option. This option will search for the closest wikipedia of your synth. Please consider donating to WikiLocation if you are using the w=1 option.

My PS2

This is a new page allowing you to quickly preview all your ps2 synths. They are grouped by topology (spin, panorama, wall, walk) and then sorted by captured date.

My info

Sadly the captured date information is not properly filled by the system (it’s using the upload date). You need to click on ‘fix capturedDate’ to set the captured date of all your ps2 (it might take a while: wait for the ‘done’ alert box).

Preview – Create

The extension is adding an animated preview which will help you to choose the proper topology:

Comments

This extension was created by me only and thus it doesn’t mean that this is representative of upcoming photosynth feature.

FYI this is not my first extension for the photosynth website, I’ve already created one which is adding a webgl fallback viewer if you don’t have silverlight for photosynth1 content.

Have fun exploring all feature introduced in this chrome extension!

Share

PhotoSynthToolkit 11

May 23rd, 2012

I’ve for some reason extra time to kill so I’ve updated PhotoSynthToolkit (SFMToolkit will follow soon). I’ve been only focusing on PMVS2 for this release: I’ve integrated Nghiaho optimization, fixed white-space folder handling in PMVS2 using boost::filesystem and fixed the timing output in the console. Thus there is no need for the ugly temporary z drive anymore :-) .

Nghiaho optimizations are disabled by default as I’ve found that it generates a point cloud less dense. You can enable the optimization by adding:

--optimize

as last PMVS2.exe parameter in your command prompt or just activate the optimization by modifying the following files:

  • 3 – Prepare for PMVS2.wsf line 49 -> var USE_OPTIMIZED_PMVS = true;
  • 4 – Prepare for CMVS.wsf line 46 -> var USE_OPTIMIZED_PMVS = true;

You can download PhotoSynthToolkit11.zip.

Share

PhotoSynthToolkit 10

May 1st, 2012

What do you think of this concept: a new PhotoSynthToolkit version almost everyday? :-) .

This version introduce a new feature that will allow you to process a PhotoSynth without needing to wait for the end of the upload. In fact you can even cancel your synth as soon as the computation is complete. But be aware that all pictures uploaded in the meantime will stay on photosynth server (AFAIK).

How to proceed:
- wait for synth to be processed (but not fully uploaded).
- copy the 2 following files from %temp%\Photosynther to another folder (d:\my_synth for example)

  • collection.dzcz
  • collection.synth.bin

- then you can launch the step 1 of the PhotoSynthToolkit by providing your folder (d:\my_synth).
- you’ll need then to copy your original jpegs to the distort folder and you’re done!

You can download PhotoSynthToolkit10.zip.

Share

PhotoSynthToolkit 8

April 14th, 2012

I’ve finally decided to release the new version of my PhotoSynthToolkit. This new version has bundle.out output support: this was indeed easy to add as I’ve already implemented it in my WebGL chrome extension. I’ve also rewritten the network part of the downloader by using libcurl. PhotoSynthDownloader is now replaced by my new tool PhotoSynthGrabber. BTW thumbnail/HD pictures downloading should be really much faster ;-) .

New feature coming:

  • CMVS support (coming very soon)
  • White space handling in the toolkit scripting (PhotoSynthGrabber is already ready)
  • Expose HTTP Proxy parameters for the downloader

You can download the new version: PhotoSynthToolkit8.zip or keep the previous one in case you miss some advanced feature (vis.dat generation, SoftImage XSI / 3DS Max scripting for example): PhotoSynthToolkit7.zip.

Share

WebGL Photosynth extension updated

March 25th, 2012

I’ve updated my PhotoSynth extension for Google Chrome. I’ve included all optimization described in my previous post: point cloud loading is 4x faster and ply file generation could be 17x faster in some cases ;-) . As you can see in the screenshot below, I’ve also added a new checkbox to let you choose if you want to load thumbnails or not in the WebGL context (which could take a while for synth with more than 200 pictures).

 

There is still room for improvements: I’ve discovered lot of interesting stuff that I’ve to try in Lilli Thompson speech at the GDC. In particular I’d like to improve:

  • memory usage: track V8 garbage collection
  • thumbnails loading: could be speed-up by using a web workers too
  • Three.js rendering: I still need to switch to r48 and use BufferGeometry
  • bundle.out generation: still very slow for big synth

To accelerate bundle.out file generation I’ve found a solution working pretty well for very large ascii file (80mo+). I’m generating the ascii file by writing directly in binary in a Uint8Array (by chunk of 1mo). The resulting code is more complex but is as fast as regular string concatenation and in comparison as a memory footprint very limited. It’s not integrated in the extension yet as my test case is working well (ascii ply generation) but bundle.out is slow (I need to track V8 bailout/deopt to understand why it’s slow).

Share