I'm referencing Neal Stephenson's fantastic science fiction work Snow Crash in my title, but what I'm really talking about is this: Photosynth demonstration. Looks like a fantastic resource.
Thank you to Jenny Davidson of Light Reading for the link.
Now go forth and read Isaac Asimov's fantastic short story The Last Question. Odd combination, n'est-ce pas?
Friday, July 20, 2007
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Posted by MKH at 12:38 PM
Labels: Futures, internet, technology
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2 comments:
One thing that struck me about the demonstration--extraordinary as it is--is the way that for these guys, it's a present-tense investigation exclusively--a way of gathering data on far-flung places and buildings and such. (Tne Notre Dame demonstration really is spectacular.) As a historically inclined person, though, my first thought was whether and how this could be used to reconstruct past places; it's easy to see what you could do with things from the era of photography, but what about older images, archeological sites now eroded, etc.? What could the technology do with a real hodgepodge of records?!? And could it be used to let us "go inside" books like something out of children's literature? Imagine being able to enter into one of those really beautiful medieval manuscripts, for instance, as if one were walking through rooms...
Yeah, that's a really intriguing idea. I love the idea of walking through the Lindisfarne Gospels. Or even the Vitellius text of the Old English Wonders -- being able to really sense the physical relationships between picture and text, the way in which a monster like the Donestre, for example, interacts with his/its/her human prey.
I had a silly idea for an NYU linguistics course about plotting the philological history of a word in three dimensional space as well -- it would be like walking through word history. I had trouble figuring out the Z axis, though. My geometry was never very good...
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