Photosynth: One Year and 422,508 Synths Later

Microsoft Photosynth has turned one, and judging from the millions of photos uploaded and the billions of FLOPs necessary to integrate the digital images into synths, the service is nothing short of a success. In its first year since release, on August 20, 2008, approximately 16 million photos have been uploaded and subsequently synthed. Microsoft did not reveal the specific number of users of the Photosynth service, but the company did point out that almost 430,000 synths had been created in just the first year.

“Here are the key stats from Photosynth's first year. They're accurate to within a few percent, with the exception of the FLOPs number which is only accurate to an order of magnitude. 422,508 synths created; 15,880,950 photos synthed and uploaded; 15,541,978,306 3D points in all point clouds combined (15.6 billion); 26,445,915,945,733,700 number of floating point operations performed in all computations (26 quadrillion); 8,979,357,357 peak simultaneous FLOPs of all computations (8.9 GigaFLOPs); and 472,000 peak synths viewed per day,” revealed David Gedye, Photosynth group program manager.

But of course that Photosynth has reached just its first milestone in evolution with the one year anniversary. The team behind the project is currently working to provide a Silverlight 3-based viewer for Photosynth. The promise is that the new viewer, based on the latest version of Silverlight, will be made available to users in the fall of 2009. The Photosynth Silverlight 3 viewer will be designed to ensure a superior user experience including enhanced transitions, reduced network chatter, as well as a new "angle" when it comes down to viewing synths.

“Our commercial Photosynth licensing announcement in May confirmed what was rumored before – that Photosynth had graduated out of Live Labs to become part of Virtual Earth. For individuals and businesses, synths are becoming an important way to document the places they care about. Those places all live on a map, and what our customers have been asking for is to make this connection both obvious and magical. We're working on it,” Gedye added.