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PicLens - 3D image browsing

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

just hat a great time toying around with PicLens, a browser-extension that displays image-streams in a semi-3D environment. controlling the image-stream is easy: use the scrollbar to swift through pictures quickly and smoothly, zoom using the mouse-wheel.

PicLens is available for Firefox, IE, Safari, works fullscreen, and basically supports any website offering RSS-feeds with enclosures (f.e. flickr, photobucket, smugmug). There’s also support for YouTube and Amazon.

360Cities - The World in VR

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

very cool: 5.000 VR-panorama-shots in more than 40 cities: 360cities.net

360cities

(via Google Blogoscoped)

Shozu: stop the captcha madness!

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

every time I’m trying to register their application for use on a new phone, Shozu forces me into solving ridiculous riddles like this one…please stop the captcha-madness! ;)

Shozu

still, Shozu is the most excellent tool for mobile photo-blogging, allowing to post pics & videos with a single push of a button to various destinations like flickr, blip.tv or YouTube. and after mastering their exercise in captcha, my Nokia N80 is ready to shoot again :)

Zooomr 3.0 - Dave vs. Goliath

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007

Zooomr

from my point of view, Zooomr vs. Flickr is the perfect web 2.0-rendition of the rather scriptical Dave vs. Goliath-meme, except that Flickr is a web 2.0 poster-boy everybody - including myself - seems to love :) - leaving aside recent censorship issues - which brings me to another point: I really think it’s pretty ingenious of Thomas Hawk, CEO of Zooomr, to use Flickr.com as their primary PR-platform.

but anyway. as of today, Zooomr now has Twitter-like notification features and - coming up - a marketplace which will enable photographers to monetize their work. if that’s not enough, maybe Zooomr’s unlimited & free diskspace might lure you away from Flickr - I’m certainly tempted…

read my earlier coverage of Zooomr

launch: Scrapblog

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Scrapblog, the photo-layout & -blogging tool profiled in beta last year is about to go live after securing VC-funding earlier this month. the flash-based layout-editor is probably still the best & visually appealing I’ve seen to date, plus they’ve added a nice embeddable slideshow-widget which will help spreading the service.

Photobucket: update

Saturday, February 17th, 2007

the latest flash-based annotation & arrangement-tools of Photobucket sure look good. recording for audio & video seems to be built in too (features currently only available to premium users).

Photobucket

(screenshot courtesy of TechCrunch)

Comeeko: ajax-cartoon editor

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

Comeeko is a fun online cartoon editor similar to popular Mac-app Comic Life (though the latter is significantly more versatile). the ajax-interface allows easy arrangement & annotation of images, however text-formatting is quite limited due to the nature of html/css.

comeeko

(via Ajaxian)

Microsoft Photosynth: tech preview

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

Photosynth - a Microsoft Labs technology prototype first seen in july - has been released into public preview on the last day of this years web 2.0 summit. the active-x-based software analyzes & arranges numerous pictures of one location in a 3D-space, making pictures browseable in a unique and gorgeous way. the preview is limited to predefined image-sets (expect to see Piazza San Marco or San Pietro like you never did before) and doesn’t support user-uploaded scenarios. nonetheless, recommended eye-candy - unfortunately for internet explorer 6.x/7x only.

photosynth.png

Beta: Scrapblog

Saturday, September 23rd, 2006

Scrapblog is a flash-based photo-blogging & -layout-tool similar to tabblo. starting a photo-page (’scrapblog’) is pretty straight-forward: just choose a template (there are not too many to choose from, though), upload some pics and drag&drop them onto the page. flickr-users will love the nice import-feature (take care, popup-blockers might interfere!), which even allows to filter for flickr-tags. [mashups like this are the reason I think flickr is still the king of photo-sites]

the layout-engine supports scaling and rotation of images, picture frames, text-blocks & -bubbles and layering of objects. the solid user-interface feels very much like a desktop-app, some glitches aside. f.e it seems to be impossible to fill predefined frames with photos, instead users are required to manually arrange frames around pictures. while the layout-engine allows multiple pages on a scrapblog, the pages itself are of fixed size with no ability to scroll.

Scrapblogs can be either kept private or made public, with the ability for visitors to subscribe to a particular photo-page via email or RSS. while each Scrapblog has its own feed, the application lacks a general feed syndicating all blogs of one user - this means my friends won’t take notice if I start a new Scrapblog.

Scrapblog

check out my demo-page to get a feeling for Scrapblog’s capabilities!

digital face beautification

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

Lukas Zinnagl pointed me to the works of Tommer Leyvand (graduated from Tel-Aviv University, now on Microsoft’s Xbox-360 team) and the Digital Face Beautification-tool he’s working on together with others. unlike the everyday photoshop-jobs we all became so used to, Tommer’s approach is to - automatically - apply only as subtle manipulation as possible, yet achieve a significant increase in “predicted attractiveness-ratings”:

The main challenge is to achieve this goal while introducing only minute, subtle modifications to the original image, such that the resulting “beautified” face maintains a strong, unmistakable similarity to the original [...] The effectiveness of the proposed method was experimentally validated by a group of test subjects who consistently rated the modified faces as more attractive than the original ones.

Digital Beauty