Microsoft & the BBC offer 3D virtual tours of historic UK sites

Stuart Corner
Friday, 08 June 2007 03:21

Your IT - Home IT

Microsoft is employing its Photosynth technology to offer, via the web, three dimensional virtual tours of famous historic locations in the UK.

The sites featured will be the same as those in a current BBC TV series 'How We Built Britain'. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/britain) The Photosynth technology, first demonstrated by Microsoft at the SISGGRAPH 2006 conference in Boston in August 2006,  is able to combine thousands on uncoordinated photos of the same location taken at different times by different people with different cameras into a 3D composite than can be viewed from different angles and 'walked through'.

Microsoft says its collaboration with the BBC is "a time-limited technical trial to launch unique three-dimensional photographic representations of historic sites throughout the United Kingdom" that will run until mid-July. Viewers will be able to explore Photosynth representations of Ely Cathedral, Burghley House, the Royal Crescent, Bath, the Scottish Parliament buildings and Blackpool Tower Ballroom at http://labs.live.com/photosynth/bbc.

According to Microsoft "Historical and user-submitted images will be integrated into the synths to contrast how people interact with the locations in the past and present. By clicking and dragging their mouse, visitors to the site will be able to explore a building, zooming in to see the smallest decorative detail, or zooming out and panning through 360 degrees to place the building in a wider context.