A new view of space
Posted: Monday, August 06, 2007 9:33 AM by Alan Boyle
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CLICK ON IMAGE TO VISIT SPACE WORLD
One of the Photosynth collections in Space World
shows the shuttle Endeavour on its launch pad.
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You've seen zoomable pictures of outer-space sights, and synthetic 3-D views of alien worlds, and 360-degree panoramas of space scenes ... but today there's a brand-new way to look at the highlights of the high frontier: Space World, a photo database offered through MSNBC.com and powered by a technology called Photosynth.
The experimental software, pioneered by Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington, combines elements of all the visualization tools I've mentioned, plus an extra bit of video-game flash. Just how cool is it? That's for you to say.
(MSNBC.com is a Microsoft-NBC Universal joint venture.)
I'm still in the midst of exploring Space World myself, but I can provide a couple of tips for finding your way around, plus a reality check for the press-release hype.
Over the past couple of months, Photosynth's developers worked with NASA to snap hundreds of pictures at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The software is able to identify the similarities in different perspectives of the same object, and then knit the photos into mosaics of imagery known as "collections."
Right now, our Space World consists of four collections:
- The shuttle Endeavour on its launch pad, ready for this week's scheduled liftoff.
- Endeavour's "stack" being assembled within the 52-story Vehicle Assembly Building.
- A panoramic view of the landscape sweeping around the Vehicle Assembly Building.
- The shuttle Atlantis piggybacked on its modified Boeing 747 carrier jet.
"What you're seeing here has never been seen before," Chris Kemp, director of strategic business development at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told me. "Even if you're a VIP, you're not going to get this close to any of these facilities and get pictures like this."
In each of the collections, you can click through the photos using a filmstrip-type interface, and the perspective will morph from one photo to the next. You can also zoom in and out on each photo by clicking on the + and - buttons on the screen. You can take a 3-D swing around the "point cloud," where each point represents a particular perspective on the scene. You can even break the collection apart into its constituent images, then focus in on a particular high-resolution view.
"It's a little bit like having a giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, where the net result is an environment that's reminiscent of a video game, where you can navigate around and explore," said Adam Sheppard, group project manager for Microsoft Live Labs.
The video game analogy is apt in another way: The more processing power and bandwidth you have, the better. I was able to fly through Space World well enough on my office desktop computer, but navigating the scenes on my wireless-equipped laptop was downright painful. (To be fair, my lackadaisical laptop also absolutely refuses to run Second Life.)
Our Space World doesn't present a 3-D view in the way Second Lifers would understand the term. Rather, you jump from one flat view in the collection to another - or you "teleport" to a particularly interesting perspective by hitting a hyperlink. In each view, you're looking at a zoomable, reality-based 2-D picture rather than a synthetic 3-D construct.
The software had its genesis with a University of Washington initiative called "Photo Tourism" for knitting together bunches of photos into the collections, plus software developed by Seadragon (which was acquired by Microsoft) for making huge picture files more digestible over the Internet. In addition to Space World, Photosynth has been used to create collections for tourist hot spots in Britain, Korea, Italy and other locales.
Sheppard hopes Space World will add to the buzz over Photosynth.
"Access to NASA content has been a great opportunity to reach a broader audience than we might have traditionally reached in the past," he told me. "We do a lot of cutting-edge Internet research. We're eager to learn how the general public uses this technology to help inform our product strategy over time."
You do need a downloadable plug-in to use Photosynth, and although the software is compatible with Firefox as well as Internet Explorer, it works only with Windows XP or Vista - not Linux or the Mac OS. That might rub some people the wrong way - as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer notes today. The BBC, which has partnered with Live Labs for the British Photosynth collections, has already been facing some flak over a separate video collaboration with Microsoft.
So what's in it for NASA? The space agency provided special access to Live Labs' photographers, but no money is changing hands either way. Rather; the payoff for NASA comes in the form of increased public outreach, Ames Research Center's Kemp said. "This is just great technology being put to great use, at no cost to the American taxpayer," he said.
Similar collaborations have been forged with Google (for mapping, visualization and database management) and Yahoo (for video streaming).
In the future, we may well add other sights to Space World, such as all-over views of the Hubble Space Telescope and the international space station, rover vistas from Mars and panoramas of Apollo lunar landing sites. Microsoft Live Labs may open up the collections to pictures contributed by the public. And NASA may put Photosynth to work in other applications as well.
"This collaboration with Microsoft gives the public a new way to explore and participate in America’s space program," Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations, said in today's news release. "We are looking into ways of using this new technology to support future missions."
That last point refers to Photosynth's ability to stitch together huge photo databases automatically - for instance, the terabytes of shuttle imagery captured during every mission nowadays. As a test project, Photosynth has already been used to knit together the high-resolution pictures of the shuttle taken during the backflip that precedes docking with the space station.
"You're able to zoom around the shuttle, and zoom in and see the serial numbers on almost all the tiles. But then you're able to zoom out and see where all the photos were taken," Kemp said. "It's a much more elegant way of organizing the huge number of photos that we take of the shuttle. A lot of the people who've seen it in space operations say, 'Wow, we'd love to get our hands on that.'"
So what's your verdict? Is it closer to "Wow," or "Whoa"? Whether or not you download the plug-in and visit our new Space World, feel free to voice your views in the comments section below.
