Share your Italian photos with Photosynth

Here is an exciting technology that will help you bring to life hundreds of photos of Italy and convert them into an immersive interactive online experience.

Microsoft has finally publicly released Photosynth, an online application that has the ability to reconstruct scenes or objects from a bunch of flat photographs.

Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point the photos were taken from. With this information, Photosynth recreates the space and uses it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.

As a Microsoft employee I had a chance to play with Photosynth long time ago. But other than generically blogging about it, I couldn't really share any specific details.
Now that Photosynth is public domain, I encourage you to take a closer look at it and try to "synth" some of your own photos. The first time you visit the site, you'll need to download and install a special plugin for your browser (Windows PC only).

- Microsoft Photosynth web site
- How to introductory video
- Various user generated synths of Italy

Italian word of the day via Twitter

If you are into social media and geeky stuff, you've probably heard about Twitter. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

What's the relationship between Twitter and Italy? Well, I just found out of a new Twitter user called @italianword who broadcasts on a daily basis a new Italian term together with its meaning and a link to its audio pronunciation.

If you are studying Italian and are looking for an easy reminder of a new word to learn every day, then consider getting a Twitter account and follow @italianword.

p.s. I do have a personal Twitter account @tosolini but I mostly twit about work stuff. If you think I should start twitting about Italy more often than I blog, please let me know and I'll consider doing it.

Pasta-Fest (video)

Like every Italian, I love pasta.
Every time I go back to my home town, I make a point to visit a large grocery store to enjoy the unmatched variety of food on display. In this video I capture the experience of walking down the pasta aisle.

- Can't see the video? Watch it from YouTube
- iPod version (MP4 - 6.7Mb)