Photosynth, the magic is getting it to run
Apparently, I am not synthy enough, to borrow a phrase from Microsoft’s Photosynth beta. Wanting to try Photosynth but using a Macbook Pro as my primary computer, which is not supported natively, I launched Vista Home Premium in a VMWare Fusion (v1) virtual machine to meet the requirements of running it in Windows. After downloading and installing the software then permitting the browser plug-in to install I took a shot at my first synth. I grabbed 40 photos of our house and surrounding property taken back in 2003 and feed it into Photosynth. After it processed and uploaded the finished result to the Photosynth web site, I was presented with the following when trying to view the results:
It should work as I’ve seen reports of a video showing Photosynth working in a VMWare Fusion VM but maybe they were using the v2 beta of Fusion.
So, I installed Photosynth on my Windows XP computer running IE7 and got the exact same error.
I finally got it working on a computer running Windows Vista Business. Of the 40 images I had it process, it was only able to synth 3 of them. I went back and was more selective, this time only feeding it 9 images all from the front of the house. Again, it was only able to synth 3 photos. This surprised me because i thought there were enough common elements in at least 6 or 7 of these 9 photos.
My third attempt, this time only using images from the back of the house, used 4 of the 9 that I feed it. The problem was that it stalled at the Publishing Synth stage where it uploads the processed images to the website. I stopped it after 15 minutes and tried it again. I still stalled at the publishing step. While it sat there “publishing” my third synth, I fed it three sunset photos that I used to do a panoramic image in Photoshop over the weekend. I was curious how well it would handle it. It failed to connect any of the pieces but I’m not surprised because it had very little common ground, the ground actually, to work with. Ironically, it finished and uploaded before the stalled third synth completed. In fact, after 40 minutes I cancelled it.
Good thing this is still in beta stage. It needs some work just to make the synth’s viewable, more less creating them.
You can see my Photosynth’s here.
Posted by Al Degutis
