Virtual Reality Presentations with photography

During my travels to Alaska the past week and a half I had the good fortune to find a photo stitching program called Photosynth.  The idea isn’t anything new.  I had used stitching programs before in the late 90’s.  What set this apart was the rendering options.  Subjects weren’t strictly panoramic, a subject covered in great detail by Pano.  Subjects could be center pieces, along a wall, or traveled through.  The rendering brings the subjects alive with an almost video or 3D effect.

Bear Skull by CloudACM on Photosynth

What is really remarkable is the control this type of image presentation offers the viewer.  The experience is tactile, this makes understanding the subject more clear and discernible.  What’s hidden from the viewer is the processing and code that stitch the pictures together.  It is a marvel of computing potential that this can be done. Here’s a presentation from Blaise Aguera y Arcas, the developer of the technology at a TED event in Monterey, CA on March 2007.

Processing power is what made the photo renders possible.  It’s the processing functions that bring my attention back to the Raspberry Pi.   Here is what makes the Raspberry Pi different from micro controllers.