Week 6 VR/AR Assignment by Jonghyun Jee

The most amazing part of Blaise’s TED talk is that this video was released more than twelve years ago. Considering the fact that, back then, iPhone was not even around and many people were still using Yahoo, the technology that he showcased is more than impressive. Near the end of the video, host Chris Anderson asked Blaise: “what your software is going to allow, is that at some point, really within the next few years, all the pictures that are shared by anyone across the world are going to link together?”—Blaise’s answer was firm yes. And yet, despite its innovativeness, Photosynth did not enjoy much popularity. This is partially due to the lack of a platform to utilize the captured contents and Microsoft’s prioritization of the hardware aspect of smartphones.
It was indeed an ambitious project to create 3-D visual platform by weaving together threads of 2-D images, however, the amount of data and the prevailing technology of the time were not sufficient to shape day-to-day operations. Thanks to the rapid development of artificial intelligence, 3-D filming techniques, and data processing, we have become able to substantialize what Blaise envisioned then. Now we are in a time of transition to interconnect and utilize the richness of semantic information embedded in graphic images. By doing so, we can blur the line between reality and digital world, redefine the dynamics of how we look at and interact with the world.

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