The future of photo search

My developer friend Doug, sent me a link today to an interesting article/video on "how photos should be viewed". This technology has now been acquired by Microsoft and looks really promising.

Basically the first technology is that you can have as many pictures on your screen as you want and be able to seamlessly zoom in and out with no time delay. The technology is built on the idea that only the number of pixels you have on the screen are rendered (which is static obviously), and images are rendered as and when you zoom in and out, contributing to it's amazing performance.

Beyond that they have an even more amazing technology that maps images to each other looking for similarities. The demo video shows hundreds of pictures of Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral making up a whole entity. Really cool stuff!

The scalable pictures remind me of how revolutionary microfiche was when it first came out, enabling tons of information to be stored in such a small format. This would be a fantastic application for a digital archive. As well as the more obvious map applications, I think this technology could be applied to information discovery such as an interactive encylopedia as people tag their images with information about what is contained in them. Viewers would be able to browse the images, jumping in and out of images as things caught their attention.

Certainly it will revolutionize how we view photos and other images and may just provide an alternative to search for information retrieval. It demonstrates that any information can be presentated visually in image format (and actually they demo'd a text file too) and will be browse-able in a way that is not currently available (most computers choke when given a large number of digital images).

It also poses some interesting scenarios for research, many of which may be highly subjective, such as image placement patterns (what is the focus of attention, are all parts of the screen viewed equally), repetitions (do you view something because there are more repetitions of it (and does it make a difference if they are in blocks or not), attractiveness of photos (colors, contrast etc).

Kudos for Microsoft for acquiring this (and supporting these start up developers) and I'm sure we'll be seeing more of this in the future.