Scott,
Scott and
Tim were among the first to blog about today's big news -
Miguel de Icaza's announcement that Moonlight 1.0 is live! It's a pretty impressive achievement, which I hope to write more about once I have installed and played with it myself.
However, hidden in
Miguel's post was something else I thought was just as cool -- Barack Obama's inauguration Photosynth
The Moment was shown in
Moonlight (not just
on Photosynth)... wha!?
I
thought this was a massive 'discovery'.
Photosynth previously had a custom viewer install that only ran on Windows... and now it's on Linux?!
Turns out
ScottGu did 'announce' this, back in January (don't know how I missed it)
CNN and MSNBC are both launching Photosynth viewers that will ... combine pictures ... to create an interactive Photosynth experience of the event using Silverlight’s built-in DeepZoom feature to deliver an amazing 3D viewing of it.
Check out the difference between the plug-in version (
view synth):
and the Silverlight version (
view synth and
object tag):
Very similar - all the Silverlight version is missing is the 'control point cloud' that you see holding down
Ctrl
in the embedded viewer.
Turns out the CNN version hosts
Photosynth.xap
with the following assemblies -- including
Kit3D!
Here's how the
HTML looks to
host it. It's fairly trivial to extract the
.DZC
filename from a
Photosynth.net page and embed it in Silverlight.
In Photosynth.net HTML sourceFind the
var _collectionInfo
JSON object and extract the
"Url":"http://mslabs-328.vo.llnwd.net/d6/photosynth/M6/collections/89/49/43/894943c7-0a67-477f-9607-1eb1ee62eab1.dzc"
In a new Silverlight host page paste the DZC in the
initParams
<param name="initParams" value="autoplay=true,dzcPath=http://mslabs-328.vo.llnwd.net/d6/photosynth/M6/collections/89/49/43/894943c7-0a67-477f-9607-1eb1ee62eab1.dzc"/>
So if you are playing around with
Moonlight 1.0 it's fairly trivial to access the thousands of existing
Photosynths (unfortunately I think you'll still need Windows to create one).
Finally, unless Microsoft releases something 'official' I doubt it's
allowed to redistribute
Photosynth.xap
to display your own synths (especially for commercial purposes). Interestingly, the
Photosynth site still says Like the viewing experience, the "synther"
only runs on PCs (XP and Vista) :-).
P.S. I expected a Silverlight synth viewer sooner; writing back in
August 2008given the shared heritage with the Silverlight 2.0 MultiScaleImage control I wouldn't be surprised to see a Photosynth 'viewer' in RTM version of Silverlight 2.0 (or certainly a future version after that).
EDIT: I had previously wondered how the Photosynth data was stored, since each Photosynth is opened via a
.DZC
file (see above). I guess Fiddler would have answered the question - a JSON file is downloaded based on the DZC location:
dzcUrl.Replace(".dzc", ".synth_files/0.json")
. A summary of the
JSON for that synth is shown here (thanks to
JSON Viewer).
I guess it's all this data that was harvested for the
pointcloud explorer built by
these guys, in Python!