Speaking of innovation ...

[allix]

I was looking at the videos as that's the only thing that will work on linux of photosynth. Its basically an application that gathers photos of the same place but in different positions and angles and creates a 3d environment out of them where you can move around as if its a real world. I am presuming the technology is not going be released as final for a few years to come, nether less it looks interesting and useful as well as fun.

Of course there is a lot of money backing such a project, in the free software world with the same funding , the money would go to existing technology to improve it, which comes down to little experimentation on the desktop.

Will we always be walking behind?

[mikeschoon]

This is too vague of a project. It has a coolness factor to it, but what functional purpose does it have? I'm sure the open source community is secretly working on a holodeck to replace it by the time it all works.

[allix]

One could of course argue that seeing a whole place can easily be done with a video camera instead of taking many shots and combining them together.
After all photos are meant to be still and one dimensional, video is what allowed for everything to capture.

One thing for sure, those demos were proberly done on clusters as it seems very smooth. That will be the factor imo that delays this app, rendering time.
The demo that's for windows only does not allow one to use their own images, that tells me the demo is pretty useless.