Skip to main content

The International Space Station and Mars Rover in 3D using Photosynth

Microsoft Photosynth is an online software application that takes a number of still photographs and stitches them together to create a 3D panorama. Viewers can zoom in into the photos to view details or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle. Photosynth works great for photo tourism allowing visitors to view tourist places as 3D models created from real photographs.

Anyway, the technology is exciting and NASA has been toying with it for some time. Recently, NASA released a Photosynth collection of the International Space Station and the next Mars rover.

ISS-photosynth

The collection gives you a 3D tour of each of the modules of the International Space Station as photographed by NASA Astronaut Sarah Magnus during the 129 days she lived onboard, as well as stunning external views of the station she took while on board Space Shuttle Endeavour during STS-118.

The Photosynth collection of the Mars rover gives a stunning 360 degree view of the Mars Science Lab that is scheduled for launch in 2011.  Expert ‘synther’ Laurence Moroney from Microsoft worked with the folks at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to create the Photosynth view of a full scale model of the new rover being tested in a facility known as the ‘Mars Yard’. The synth is comprised of over 300 individual photographs.

You will require to install Microsoft Silverlight, if you haven’t already have, to view the synth.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

69 alternatives to the default Facebook profile picture

If you have changed the default Facebook profile picture and uploaded your own, it’s fine. But if not, then why not replace that boring picture of the guy with a wisp of hair sticking out of his head with something different and funny?
332 comments
Read more

How to Record CPU and Memory Usage Over Time in Windows?

Whenever the computer is lagging or some application is taking too long to respond, we usually fire up task manager and look under the Performance tab or under Processes to check on processor utilization or the amount of free memory available. The task manager is ideal for real-time analysis of CPU and memory utilization. It even displays a short history of CPU utilization in the form of a graph. You get a small time-window, about 30 seconds or so, depending on how large the viewing area is.
17 comments
Read more

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.
1 comment
Read more