Photosynth: Microsoft Live Labs in the Classroom

I was impressed with the demo of Microsoft Photosynth at the recent UK Innovative Teachers Forum and also at the 2009 NAACE Conference.

Photosynth is a way to turn normal photographs into a rich and inspiring 3D environment that you can rotate and zoom in and out of. It’s surprisingly easy to use and incredibly powerful as long as you have enough photographs. They say that about 75 is the minimum.

I have all sorts of ideas on how Photosynth could be used within fieldwork or as a form of assessment. But I thought I would start off with the basics. I want to use it for Transition, to help open up the schools learning spaces for others to see.

I picked one of the schools CDT rooms – I really like this room in the school. It’s filled with children’s work that regularly changes over time. I thought that by creating a Photosynth of the room the primary children could see some of the work that is produced by secondary school students.

I also thought the secondary students could use it for formative assessment. The schools CDT department regularly use their displays to point to examples of good practice. I thought by allowing this virtual classroom to be available 24 hours a day students might re-visit some of the displays to help them with their own learning?

I had originally planned on taking 20 or so photographs to just create a panorama of the front of the room. Then I got carried away decided that I should do things properly so took 176 photographs of the whole room.

Up-loading the photos to Photosynth was surprisingly easy although the synth then took about 2 hours to render with 96% synthisity (which is apparently very good?).

My final creation is embedded below. Note, you will have to have Silverlight installed on your computer for it to work.

Comments

[Alan Parkinson]

Hi Ollie
My first photosynth of Hunstanton's stripy cliffs is rendering as we speak... Will hopefully share later today...