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At the risk of being a lit­tle MS heavy just lately, I’ve been catch­ing up on recent posts from TED and came across the demo of Pho­to­synth. It’s the result of the acqui­si­tion of image tech com­pany Sead­ragon and some awfully smart thinking,

Pho­to­synth recog­nises the sim­i­lar­i­ties between pho­tographs in a way that allows it to cre­ate a vir­tual 3D envi­ron­ment. You can then zoom in and out of that envi­ron­ment, mov­ing through all the avail­able images of that scene. And it’s really rather impressive.

The TEDtalk can be found here. If any­thing, how­ever, the fol­low­ing demo gets it across better:

The oppor­tu­nity to cre­ate a sort of pho­to­graphic Wikipedia is enor­mous. I also won­der whether the same think­ing couldn’t form the basis of a much more inter­est­ing OS inter­face that is bet­ter at show­ing the rela­tion­ship between files.

The recent TEDtalks also showed this demo of the Bump­Top interface:

I’m sym­pa­thetic with the approach – the demo looks like my desk (on a good day). And it’s great that more inter­face options are being cre­ated than at any time recently.

I can’t help won­der­ing, how­ever, whether inter­faces based on paper and doc­u­ments are really the way for­ward. It would be great to see options based more on how peo­ple think and relate ideas to one another.

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