Watch this TED video of Neil Gershenfeld entitled The beckoning promise of personal fabrication. Neil says, “it’s over”. He also discusses fungible computer resources and how the study of Computer Science restricts the promise of advancement of computing and science. I was particularly impressed with how he sees technology and advancement being driven from the bottom up instead of the top down. I think we see some application of computer resources on a pay per drink model being implemented in the cloud, however, his talk goes further and looks at computing resources being material and even atomic in nature which is where the real future lies.

I was very impressed with the Photosynth technology when I first saw the TED video online late last year and recently was discussing this with some folks who hadn’t seen it. I wanted to capture this and to see where the technology has progressed to now that it’s owned by Microsoft.

One thing I noticed was the similarity of the image effects engine in Silverlight and Photosynth. The Hard Rock Cafe demoed their implementation of a massive graphic presentation during Mixx (I think) and launched their own 257 image memorabilia exploration tool tool which looks VERY MUCH like the Photosynth tool demoed at TED. I’ve found the performance of the application to be sluggish even over broadband, but it is a nice way to explore such a large dataset.

Microsoft’s Labs site has the Photosynth demo online for XP/Vista users only. I am really more interested in seeing the impact of the 3D modeling software that was demoed in the second half of the video. Unfortunately my 1st generation MacBook Pro and Vista install wouldn’t cooperate and run the demo.

Silverlight is fully supported on the Mac (even using Safari). For now I’ll have to be patient and hopeful. The visual effects engine and massive image set pieces have been integrated with Silverlight. Perhaps Silverlight 3 or some other future version will bring in the 3D visualization components.